Support of rtl8723bs

Support of rtl8723bs

[Hanno Zulla]

Hi Jes,
hello linux-wireless,

I'd like to know more about the current progress of rtl8723bs support
for Linux.

Googling and reading the mailing list archives found an older vendor driver
https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs

plus patches at
https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723bs

which both aren't ready for Linux according to
https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/issues/96

According to
https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/issues/98

there is a newer vendor driver from Realtek at
https://github.com/anthonywong/rtl8723bs
which Anthony wants to get ready for inclusion to the Ubuntu kernel.

But after reading
https://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=146902477024130&w=2
it appears that even that newer vendor driver isn't ready for Jes's work.

Anyway, as an owner of such a device, I'd like to help somehow, and be
it as a guinea pig to test on my hardware. The newer vendor driver
crashed on Ubuntu' 4.4 sources and doesn't compile yet on Ubuntu 4.8-rc
sources.
https://github.com/anthonywong/rtl8723bs/issues/1

Kind regards,

Hanno

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Bastien Nocera]

On Mon, 2016-09-12 at 11:20 +0200, Hanno Zulla wrote:
> Hi Jes,
> hello linux-wireless,
> 
> I'd like to know more about the current progress of rtl8723bs support
> for Linux.
> 
> Googling and reading the mailing list archives found an older vendor
> driver
> https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs

This is the canonical location.

> plus patches at
> https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723bs

This is an old tree.

> which both aren't ready for Linux according to
> https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/issues/96
> 
> According to
> https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/issues/98
> 
> there is a newer vendor driver from Realtek at
> https://github.com/anthonywong/rtl8723bs
> which Anthony wants to get ready for inclusion to the Ubuntu kernel.
> 
> But after reading
> https://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=146902477024130&w=2
> it appears that even that newer vendor driver isn't ready for Jes's
> work.

The "hadess" driver above is an older vendor driver with 2 years of
cleanups, and lots of code removal:
 430 files changed, 81387 insertions(+), 254812 deletions(-)

Anthony's repo is just a dump of a newer version of the driver.

What would be useful would be to compare the newer vendor driver with
the last time the "hadess" driver was rebased
(a2e5bb366f6d6c19dcab6db47b68a944256e8228) and pick out bug fixes.

Anyway, as an owner of such a device, I'd like to help somehow, and
be
> it as a guinea pig to test on my hardware. The newer vendor driver
> crashed on Ubuntu' 4.4 sources and doesn't compile yet on Ubuntu 4.8-
> rc
> sources.
> https://github.com/anthonywong/rtl8723bs/issues/1

I really don't care about the vendor driver. There's no way to track
changes other than through code dumps.

Longer term, it seems likely that improving Jes' driver is the way to
go. At least there's 170k less lines of code to read in the rtl8723bs
driver to get things going.

Cheers

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Anthony Wong]

On 12 September 2016 at 20:23, Bastien Nocera <hadess@hadess.net> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2016-09-12 at 11:20 +0200, Hanno Zulla wrote:
> > Hi Jes,
> > hello linux-wireless,
> >
> > I'd like to know more about the current progress of rtl8723bs support
> > for Linux.
> >
> > Googling and reading the mailing list archives found an older vendor
> > driver
> > https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs
>
> This is the canonical location.
>
> > plus patches at
> > https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723bs
>
> This is an old tree.
>
> > which both aren't ready for Linux according to
> > https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/issues/96
> >
> > According to
> > https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/issues/98
> >
> > there is a newer vendor driver from Realtek at
> > https://github.com/anthonywong/rtl8723bs
> > which Anthony wants to get ready for inclusion to the Ubuntu kernel.
> >
> > But after reading
> > https://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=146902477024130&w=2
> > it appears that even that newer vendor driver isn't ready for Jes's
> > work.
>
> The "hadess" driver above is an older vendor driver with 2 years of
> cleanups, and lots of code removal:
>  430 files changed, 81387 insertions(+), 254812 deletions(-)
>
> Anthony's repo is just a dump of a newer version of the driver.

Indeed, the code in my git repo is simply the driver source code
extracted from what was provided by the vendor. It's pushed to github
in the hope that it can help anyone who works on supporting this wifi
device and can serve as a reference for future development.

Cheers,
Anthony

>
>
> What would be useful would be to compare the newer vendor driver with
> the last time the "hadess" driver was rebased
> (a2e5bb366f6d6c19dcab6db47b68a944256e8228) and pick out bug fixes.
>
> Anyway, as an owner of such a device, I'd like to help somehow, and
> be
> > it as a guinea pig to test on my hardware. The newer vendor driver
> > crashed on Ubuntu' 4.4 sources and doesn't compile yet on Ubuntu 4.8-
> > rc
> > sources.
> > https://github.com/anthonywong/rtl8723bs/issues/1
>
> I really don't care about the vendor driver. There's no way to track
> changes other than through code dumps.
>
> Longer term, it seems likely that improving Jes' driver is the way to
> go. At least there's 170k less lines of code to read in the rtl8723bs
> driver to get things going.
>
> Cheers

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Jes Sorensen]

Bastien Nocera <hadess@hadess.net> writes:
> On Mon, 2016-09-12 at 11:20 +0200, Hanno Zulla wrote:
>> Hi Jes,
>> hello linux-wireless,
>> it as a guinea pig to test on my hardware. The newer vendor driver
>> crashed on Ubuntu' 4.4 sources and doesn't compile yet on Ubuntu 4.8-
>> rc
>> sources.
>> https://github.com/anthonywong/rtl8723bs/issues/1
>
> I really don't care about the vendor driver. There's no way to track
> changes other than through code dumps.
>
> Longer term, it seems likely that improving Jes' driver is the way to
> go. At least there's 170k less lines of code to read in the rtl8723bs
> driver to get things going.

Longer term I think it makes sense to add SDIO support to rtl8xxxu. The
differences between the USB version and the SDIO version are rather
small.

That said, I have quite a lot of things on my TODO list so it is going
to take some time until I can look at this. It may make sense to pull
a cleaned up version of the vendor driver into staging until then if
there is a desperate need for it, but otherwise any help would be
appreciated :)

Jes

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Larry Finger]

On 09/12/2016 09:47 AM, Jes Sorensen wrote:
> Bastien Nocera <hadess@hadess.net> writes:
>> On Mon, 2016-09-12 at 11:20 +0200, Hanno Zulla wrote:
>>> Hi Jes,
>>> hello linux-wireless,
>>> it as a guinea pig to test on my hardware. The newer vendor driver
>>> crashed on Ubuntu' 4.4 sources and doesn't compile yet on Ubuntu 4.8-
>>> rc
>>> sources.
>>> https://github.com/anthonywong/rtl8723bs/issues/1
>>
>> I really don't care about the vendor driver. There's no way to track
>> changes other than through code dumps.
>>
>> Longer term, it seems likely that improving Jes' driver is the way to
>> go. At least there's 170k less lines of code to read in the rtl8723bs
>> driver to get things going.
>
> Longer term I think it makes sense to add SDIO support to rtl8xxxu. The
> differences between the USB version and the SDIO version are rather
> small.
>
> That said, I have quite a lot of things on my TODO list so it is going
> to take some time until I can look at this. It may make sense to pull
> a cleaned up version of the vendor driver into staging until then if
> there is a desperate need for it, but otherwise any help would be
> appreciated :)

I agree with Jes that adding support for SDIO in rtl8xxxu would be a useful 
step. If anyone wants to help, that would be the place to start. I disagree that 
this driver should be dumped into staging. If one reads the various issues 
associated with the GitHub repo, you will see that this driver has severe 
problems that are unlikely to be fixed with a cleanup. The latest report is that 
the driver causes the loss of clock interrupts, which is not surprising given 
the sorry state of locking in the driver.

Complicating matters is that no one outside Realtek ever sees the details of any 
commit. At intervals, they make a dump of their current code and release it. The 
differences between two such releases amounts to many thousands of lines, and 
finding any changes due to bug fixes is a "needle in the haystack" problem.

Larry

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Hanno Zulla]

Hi,

> Longer term I think it makes sense to add SDIO support to rtl8xxxu. The
> differences between the USB version and the SDIO version are rather
> small.

This is beyond my expertise, sadly.

Is there a good blueprint / example of a previous case where a USB
driver had SDIO support added that one might learn from?

Kind regards,

Hanno

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Bastien Nocera]

On Mon, 2016-09-12 at 17:48 +0200, Hanno Zulla wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > Longer term I think it makes sense to add SDIO support to rtl8xxxu.
> > The
> > differences between the USB version and the SDIO version are rather
> > small.
> 
> 
> This is beyond my expertise, sadly.
> 
> Is there a good blueprint / example of a previous case where a USB
> driver had SDIO support added that one might learn from?

I don't know on top of my head, sorry. Best look in the kernel sources
directly.

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Jes Sorensen]

Bastien Nocera <hadess@hadess.net> writes:
> On Mon, 2016-09-12 at 17:48 +0200, Hanno Zulla wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> > Longer term I think it makes sense to add SDIO support to rtl8xxxu.
>> > The
>> > differences between the USB version and the SDIO version are rather
>> > small.
>> 
>> 
>> This is beyond my expertise, sadly.
>> 
>> Is there a good blueprint / example of a previous case where a USB
>> driver had SDIO support added that one might learn from?
>
> I don't know on top of my head, sorry. Best look in the kernel sources
> directly.

The issues I am aware of is to start out changing the register access
macros into function pointers and stick them all into the fileops
structure. Provide a set of SDIO ones to match the USB ones. Then you
will need some code to detect the device, as that part will obviously be
different from the USB device detection.

I know there are a few issues to look out for in the hw register init
files to look out for too, that does some special casing for SDIO, but
that should be limited. I am happy to point someone in the right
direction on that when they get to that.

Cheers,
Jes

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Hanno Zulla]

Hi,

> The issues I am aware of is to start out changing the register access
> macros into function pointers and stick them all into the fileops
> structure. Provide a set of SDIO ones to match the USB ones. Then you
> will need some code to detect the device, as that part will obviously be
> different from the USB device detection.
> 
> I know there are a few issues to look out for in the hw register init
> files to look out for too, that does some special casing for SDIO, but
> that should be limited. I am happy to point someone in the right
> direction on that when they get to that.

I had a brief look into the sources of other drivers implementing SDIO,
but not being a kernel-dev, this is out of my league.

If you decide to reprioritize your TODO-List in favour of adding SDIO
sooner, I'll be gladly testing this for you on my hardware (and buy you
a beer).

Kind regards,

Hanno

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Larry Finger]

On 09/13/2016 02:47 AM, Hanno Zulla wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> The issues I am aware of is to start out changing the register access
>> macros into function pointers and stick them all into the fileops
>> structure. Provide a set of SDIO ones to match the USB ones. Then you
>> will need some code to detect the device, as that part will obviously be
>> different from the USB device detection.
>>
>> I know there are a few issues to look out for in the hw register init
>> files to look out for too, that does some special casing for SDIO, but
>> that should be limited. I am happy to point someone in the right
>> direction on that when they get to that.
>
> I had a brief look into the sources of other drivers implementing SDIO,
> but not being a kernel-dev, this is out of my league.
>
> If you decide to reprioritize your TODO-List in favour of adding SDIO
> sooner, I'll be gladly testing this for you on my hardware (and buy you
> a beer).

I received a CherryTrail z8300 device yesterday with RTL8723BS wifi and BT. I 
have started making the changes that Jes suggested. Once I get something 
running, I will post patches here for review, and I will also make them 
available in Bastien's repo.

I make no promises on when anything will be available.

Larry

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Hanno Zulla]

Hi,

has there been any progress on the rtl8723bs / sdio issue?

There were no updates to this mailing list or the usual git repositories
since this was last discussed, unless I missed the proper place to look
for this.

I'm sorry that I can't be more helpful with actual development, but am
eager to help with testing this device.

Thank you,

Hanno

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Jes Sorensen]

Hanno Zulla <abos@hanno.de> writes:
> Hi,
>
> has there been any progress on the rtl8723bs / sdio issue?
>
> There were no updates to this mailing list or the usual git repositories
> since this was last discussed, unless I missed the proper place to look
> for this.
>
> I'm sorry that I can't be more helpful with actual development, but am
> eager to help with testing this device.
>
> Thank you,
> Hanno

Hanno,

The 8723bs project is currently in idle mode, I haven't had time to
spend time on it for the last couple of months.

Cheers,
Jes

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Larry Finger]

On 01/16/2017 07:25 AM, Jes Sorensen wrote:
> Hanno Zulla <abos@hanno.de> writes:
>> Hi,
>>
>> has there been any progress on the rtl8723bs / sdio issue?
>>
>> There were no updates to this mailing list or the usual git repositories
>> since this was last discussed, unless I missed the proper place to look
>> for this.
>>
>> I'm sorry that I can't be more helpful with actual development, but am
>> eager to help with testing this device.
>>
>> Thank you,
>> Hanno
>
> Hanno,
>
> The 8723bs project is currently in idle mode, I haven't had time to
> spend time on it for the last couple of months.

I have also been busy.

Larry

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Hanno Zulla]

Hi,

it was exciting to see

https://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=148735587909056&w=2

So please forgive me for asking about the current state of things.

Kind regards,

Hanno

Re: Support of rtl8723bs

[Larry Finger]

On 03/29/2017 05:20 AM, Hanno Zulla wrote:
> Hi,
>
> it was exciting to see
>
> https://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=148735587909056&w=2
>
> So please forgive me for asking about the current state of things.

I cannot divulge any details at present, but there are plans to submit a staging 
driver for the RTL8723BS card.

Larry