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Linux kernel driver for USB WiFi dongles based on Realtek rtl8812au chipset
mk-fg/rtl8812au
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README.rst
Linux kernel driver for USB WiFi dongles based on Realtek rtl8812au chipset
Linux kernel driver for USB WiFi dongles based on Realtek rtl8812au chipset.
This is a fork of gordboy/rtl8812au, which is based on 5.2.20 realtek driver version:
gordboy repo already has VHT patches and is updated to work with latest kernels.
This repo is for testing various performance-related patches/tweaks on top of that.
For ArchLinuxARM PKGBUILD of module from this repo for ODROID-C2 (aarch64, mainline 4.13.x+ kernel), see:
For more orthodox forks of this driver, which should probably be picked instead of this one for any kind of general use, see following links:
- https://github.com/gordboy/rtl8812au/ (5.2.20)
- https://github.com/astsam/rtl8812au/ (5.1.5 with 8814A and radiotap patches)
- https://github.com/zebulon2/rtl8812au-driver-5.2.9 (used in Debian packages)
- https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/rtl8812au-dkms-git/ (Arch Linux AUR package)
Note on support / development / patches
I’m not supporting or developing this driver here, just collected a bunch of ad-hoc patches from different sources for my own purposes.
Please do not ask me to add or merge additional featues or fix something here — I’m not a kernel developer and don’t even have hardware to test this locally.
Maybe just fork the repo and apply whatever you need there instead, or complain about anything that doesn’t work right to hardware vendor or realtek (though note that they haven’t released this code publicly — see source links at the top of this README).
Coming from the future (2018+), it’s possible that you might find this driver to be superseded by one of these two modules in mainline kernels:
- rtl8xxxu — as of early 2018, 881xau ac dongles are not supported there.
To my knowledge, there are no plans to convert the buggy, and badly written, code for the RTL8812AU into a form that would be suitable for wireless. Even getting it into a form that would be acceptable for staging would be a formidable task. — Larry Finger
Should very heavily depend on card/dongle used, but between two ALFA Network AWUS036AC USB dongles plugged into RPi3/ODROID-C2 (USB 2.0) that I’ve tested using WiFi Infrastructure mode (AP + STA) with VHT (802.11ac) and 80MHz channels (in 5GHz band), throughput max with iperf3 seem to be about 220mbps or ~26 MiB/s (half-duplex).
Note that such result is for one specific pair of AP/STA dongles, running in a specific environment and configuration, so does not mean that other devices supported by this driver will have same limitations, and here just to show that driver itself can at least support that much (easily — extra cpu load is negligible, no bugs).
Relevant hostapd.conf options used for AP dongle and test:
hw_mode=a ieee80211n=1 require_ht=1 ieee80211ac=1 require_vht=1 channel=100 vht_oper_chwidth=1 vht_oper_centr_freq_seg0_idx=106 ht_capab=[HT40+][SHORT-GI-40] vht_capab=[SHORT-GI-80][MAX-MPDU-11454][MAX-A-MPDU-LEN-EXP7]
Note that some of LDPC/STBC/Beamforming options should be enabled for AP/STA implicitly, if dongle/driver support these, and can be checked by grepping «RTW: Current STA» in dmesg (with debug logging enabled) after connection (vs flags in rtw_vht.c).
Same as for test results, these aren’t necessarily supported by all dongles, and some dongles might allow e.g. 160MHz or 80+80 channel widths (different vht_oper_chwidth values), 4×4 MIMO/beamforming, and such, some of which driver seem to have the code for.
For a bit more info on AP/STA mode configuration, see following links:
Very similar performance between 5.1.5 (old-5.1.5 branch) and 5.2.20 (this one) driver versions, while 5.2.9 is way worse.
- Driver initially had bunch of regdb overrides, maybe to operate with no/broken regdb, which are removed here, to avoid any extra restrictions from these.
- Module parameter rtw_tx_pwr_idx_override (1-63, 0 — default/disabled) allows to override «tx power index» value for all channels/rates, regardless of all other parameters (regdb, CONFIG_TXPWR_BY_RATE_EN, CONFIG_TXPWR_LIMIT_EN, CONFIG_USB2_EXTERNAL_POWER, etc), if set to non-0. CONFIG_DBG_TXPOWER can be used to check default/overidden values for that (enabled with DEBUG>1, «TXPWR:» prefix).
- CONFIG_USB2_EXTERNAL_POWER is default-enabled in Makefile, can be set to «n» to force some txpower limit, don’t remember which one.
- DFS is default-disabled in Makefile.
First of all, enable DEBUG= with make or dkms.conf, e.g. make DEBUG=2 .
Values for DEBUG= are 0-3 for progressively more info, see Makefile and include/autoconf.h for details or to tweak which specific bits should be enabled.
With DEBUG>0, kmsg logging verbosity can be controlled by rtw_drv_log_level= module parameter: 0=none, 2=error, 3=warn, 4=info (default), 5=debug, 6=max.
For more information about what your specific dongle supports and is configured for, use /proc interface (with DEBUG>0) that this driver provides under /proc/net/rtl8812au/ .
Some useful info nodes there (replace «wlan0» below with your interface name):
- /proc/net/rtl8812au/ver_info — loaded driver version.
- /proc/net/rtl8812au/drv_cfg — build-time driver configuration info.
- /proc/net/rtl8812au/log_level — kmsg (dmesg) logging control.
- /proc/net/rtl8812au/wlan0/phy_cap — phy capabilities (VHT, STBC, Beamforming, etc), as supported by hardware/driver and configuration, including resulting mask of them.
- /proc/net/rtl8812au/wlan0/_info
- Counters / stats / metrics:
- /proc/net/rtl8812au/wlan0/rx_signal
- /proc/net/rtl8812au/wlan0/trx_info
- /proc/net/rtl8812au/wlan0/trx_info_debug
- /proc/net/rtl8812au/wlan0/rx_stat — counts of frames transmitted at specific mimo modes and rates (e.g. VHTSS2MCS4 = VHT + 2 Spatial Streams + MCS4 coding set, see include/hal_com.h and http://mcsindex.com/ ), gets reset after each poll.
- /proc/net/rtl8812au/wlan0/_logs — lots of counters.
================================ [Debug Message] PhyDM Selection ================================ 00. (( . ))DIG 01. (( . ))RA_MASK 02. (( V ))DYNAMIC_TXPWR 03. (( . ))FA_CNT 04. (( . ))RSSI_MONITOR 05. (( . ))CCKPD 06. (( . ))ANT_DIV 07. (( . ))SMT_ANT .
These will be logged to kmsg/dmesg, same as other debug stuff from driver.
- ra -h — help on arguments there.
- ra 1 . — show ( ra 1 100 ) or set PCR threshold offset (affects retries?), e.g. ra 1 0 10 for -10, ra 1 1 20 for +20.
- RA/RA_MASK (01, 09) in dbg command for logging of RA-related stuff.
- Related build-time options — CONFIG_DBG_RA, CONFIG_RA_DBG_CMD, CONFIG_RA_FW_DBG_CODE, CONFIG_RA_DYNAMIC_RTY_LIMIT, CONFIG_RA_DYNAMIC_RATE_ID — in autoconf.h and phydm_rainfo.c. CONFIG_RA_FW_DBG_CODE in particular to catch c2h (chip-to-host?) debug info from fw and dump them if DBG_FW_TRACE is enabled ( dbg 22 — FW_DEBUG_TRACE logging).
- fw_dbg command to enable firmware debug components via h2c, of which RA (00) is probably the only one available on consumer chips (see fw_dbg 100 for full list). fw_dbg 101 disables all fw debug components.
- phydm_c2h_ra_report_handler and odm_c2h_ra_para_report_handler in phydm_rainfo.c — relatively recent code («2017.04.20 Dino, the 3rd PHYDM reform»), though not sure if these ever trigger on end-user chips.
Repositories that seem to be most active (as of Jan 2018) wrt info on this driver, i.e. places to watch for new issues, commits, pull requests and forks (in no particular order):
- https://github.com/gordboy/rtl8812au/
- https://github.com/zebulon2/rtl8812au-driver-5.2.9/
- https://github.com/aircrack-ng/rtl8812au/
- https://github.com/astsam/rtl8812au/
- https://github.com/abperiasamy/rtl8812AU_8821AU_linux/
- https://github.com/uminokoe/rtl8812AU/ (gone!)
- https://github.com/diederikdehaas/rtl8812AU/
- https://github.com/gnab/rtl8812au/
- https://github.com/ulli-kroll/rtl8821au/
- https://github.com/lwfinger/ (rtl vendor driver sources/communication)
Not all (or any?) of these forks are linked under «Forks» tab on github.
Be sure to check different branches in these, as there are several different upstream sources (code dumps) for this driver, which these are usually based on.
- Chip datasheet (rev May 2012) and documentation for various driver features (dated from around 2009-2015, not up-to-date with the code): see document/ dir in this repo
- List of 8812au devices (not necessarily have vid/pid listed in this driver!): wikidevi.com link