Linux Kernel Patches Posted For USB Support With Realtek RTW88 WiFi Driver

Back in 2019 Realtek contributed the open-source "RTW88" WiFi driver to the Linux kernel for supporting their newer wireless chipsets on Linux. To date the mainline driver has just supported their PCI-based WiFi adapters while a patch series now out for review extends the driver to supporting their newer USB-specific chipsets.

Sascha Hauer of Pengutronix posted the set of ten patches to the kernel mailing list for adding USB chip variants to the RTW88 wireless driver. Various refactoring to the driver were needed for supporting the USB hardware as the code to this point catered to PCI/PCIe semantics. The code is also based on an out-of-tree rtw8-usb driver from GitHub by German developer Hans-Ulli Kroll.

With the patches posted today, there is the common USB support added to this WiFi Linux driver and enabling of the rtw8723du, rtw8821cu, rtw8822bu, and rtw8822cu chipsets.

See this patch series if interested in this proposed USB support for the Realtek RTW88 WiFi/WLAN driver. This USB support adds around 1.7k lines of code to this open-source Realtek WiFi driver.