About rtl8812bu driver (Cannot find in package database)

Nice work, leanos! Thanks!

hey guys any progress abt this topic?

By the way, there is an alternative source for this driver with great documentation and support: https://github.com/morrownr/88x2bu

Morrownr (Nick) collects, enhances and provides the linux drivers for Realtek chipsets rtl 8821cu, 8812au, 8821au, 8821cu, 8814au and also provides some overview and opinions on what works well and what not: https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi

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But there are no builds for OpenWrt.

Mhm, that indeed could be the case. I was just pointing to another driver source.

It is one of the best out there, next to aircrack-ng.

But is it for the rtl8812au?

And you can not create a version for the rtl8812au? The two best drivers are the one from aircrack-ng and morrownr.

I can't test it because it makes my netbook crash.

@bjlockie

Sorry to resuscitate such an old thread, but dealing with that exact problem, and kind of at my wits' end:

It needs unplugging/replugging and restarting ~every week to run it as an AP.
I think the problem is with hostapd or the driver so I'm hopeful it'll get fixed eventually.
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with a TPLink UE300 ethernet dongle and the Alfa as access point.

Did you ever manage to fix that problem?

I recently got an ALFA AWUS036ACM, hoping it would be the easiest way to improve my RPi4's Wifi… but every few days (seemingly every time a certain amount of data has been transferred), it will die and require unplugging/plugging back, to get it working.

I must admit I am a bit lost on which driver is even the recommended one at that stage (seems to be mt76x2u?), and how I can ensure I am running the latest version and/or upgrade to a more recent version.

Any tips heavily appreciated!

On their website I found that the ALFA AWUS036ACM uses the MT7612U chipset, which has nothing to do with the rtl8812bu driver. That chipset is from Mediatek, which is a different manufacturer and I would assume uses the mt76 driver by default, which is in the Linux kernel and gets merged into OpenWRT regularly. If there are bugs, I would suggest to try a newer Linux kernel or a newer version of OpenWRT. If you can reliably reproduce the issue you also could open a thread in the forums or a bug report at github.

Edit: Some users have reported mtk drivers/firmware work well for some older mediatek chipsets, so you could try those if you have severe problems, but they themselves are quite old (2019 and older) and may not adhere to newest Linux kernel standards.

For the others: Recently, there has been ongoing work to bring the rtl8812bu and some other Realtek chipsets into the Linux kernel. The project runs under the name rtw88. It might potentially make it into kernel 6.2 or something. See here:

Once this is done, there is no need anymore to manually install out of kernel drivers. Plug and play will be possible :slight_smile:

@ThiloteE Yes, indeed, this has nothing to do with the rtl88121bu driver (should have been clearer in my message): @bjlockie mentioned running that particular usb key/chipset, and described having the very problem I am experiencing, so I was hoping to maybe get some tips from them if they ever managed to fix it.

Supposedly this is a kernel-supported driver and plug-and-play (had to do a bit of tinkering, but quite possibly due to running OSMC on a RPi4, rather than a more straightforward flavour of Debian/Ubuntu), but it seems odd that such a major issue would still be occurring on this chipset (which consistently comes up on top on lists of best-supported). My knowledge of driver tinkering is unfortunately quite low, so I am barely able to figure out whether I am indeed running a recent, or the most recent, version :sweat_smile:

I forget where I read VIA is working on a firmware fix.

I use a powered USB hub.
Don't know if it's needed.

The fix for me was disabling scatter gather in the mt76 module.
The problem is in the firmware of the usb chipset on the raspberry pi4.

Google "disable scatter gather mt76".

@bjlockie Thanks for taking the time. And yes, this indeed seems to be a bug in the RPi4 USB firmware :face_with_diagonal_mouth:
My googling also took me in the direction of disabling SG, but much like the people in that GitHub thread, this did not seem to remove the problem altogether (hard to tell if it's helped, since the bug is quite unpredictable)…

Does anyone has a legit solution for this problem after these years?

morrownr told me the in-kernel driver for rtl8812bu is decent and speeds and stability roughly comparable to the out of kernel driver starting from kernel 6.2 or better the 6.3. The next release of OpenWrt 23.05 will use the 5.15 kernel. The release after (next year) will be likely 6.1. So unless the rtw88 driver is not backported, it will take two years until this hits OpenWrt.

If you only need the driver for your client device and not as accesspoint, you could install a rolling release linux distribution operating system (for example Fedora), which are those that usually follow the newest kernel versions more closely. If you cannot or are unwilling to do this, you can try the non-conforming out of kernel drivers, which are based on the official open sourced version from Realtek and usually are maintained by random, but helpful volunteers on the net (e.g. by morrownr here), but they bring their own share of problems and maybe some features will not work either.

There is also the package kmod-rtw88 in OpenWrt. You could try that one too! Who knows, maybe the performance is actually good enough for your usecase. Edit: see how to here
Edit²: the kmod-rtw88 package does not support USB until kernel 6.2 or something so yeah...

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I was working with Archer T4U v3 rtl8812bu driver back then in 2020-2021 it works perfectly I like because it can scan 5G networks too somewhere those years the Kali Linux updates made it unavailable etc. I talked with the developers they say they want it paid.

I found the driver solution for all of you guys fastoe/RTL8812BU: Realtek RTL8812BU Driver for Linux (github.com)