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I'm currently using rtl8192cu wireless drivers from proprietary firmware-realtek_20161130-4_all.deb and I'm having an unusual bandwidth (speed benchmarks giving me a 250kbps download speed and a 5mps upload speed while a Windows installation on the same machine gets 25mps downloads). I also tried the newer firmware-realtek_20180825+dfsg-1~bpo9+1_all.deb and download speeds were even slower.

I read that falling back to rtl8xxxu can help with this problem and I believe I'd be better off with that as I didn't provide the proprietary drivers for the net install of Debian and the download speed was normal at that time.

I can't find the generic driver listed in the output of lsmod | grep rtl and I lose all internet connections if I blacklist the proprietary ones. The only place where I can find a download for rtl8xxxu are the linux github and a fork that includes an hard-coded reference to drivers for a different device.

What is the correct way to obtain, install and load generic drivers from the main Linux repository? Am I supposed to just download and build the c files from the official repository?

tl;dr: What is the correct way to obtain, install and load generic drivers from the main Linux repository?

maja
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  • That hw is quite bad.... – Rui F Ribeiro Jan 01 '19 at 21:52
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    See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/252210/wi-fi-problems-using-asus-usb-n13-adapter/252215 – Rui F Ribeiro Jan 01 '19 at 23:55
  • @RuiFRibeiro I understand your pain now, still I'd like to have a go with the rtl8XXXc to make sure that's what Debian used during installation – maja Jan 02 '19 at 00:09
  • just a sidenote, if I use a dual-boot machine and if Windows is in a hyberanted state the download speed for rtl8192cu reaches 10mbps (against WIndows's 20mps) and then drops again to 250kbps if Windows is shut off properly (which I need to write to some shared storage drives) – maja Jan 02 '19 at 05:04
  • The firmware at the end of the day is a file. The problem is that low level APIs evolve. Windows is using a different version of the firmware that it is pre-loaded if you do not do a full reboot; it would be interesting to find out which one, or if it is possible to get it from the Windows file system, and use it on the Linux side. Never tried it. To go that avenue, another group on this stack could be more suited to this question, we do not dabble much with Windows. – Rui F Ribeiro Jan 02 '19 at 11:55
  • @RuiFRibeiro that'd be interesting to see, what site would you suggest? maybe ServerFault or Superuser? – maja Jan 02 '19 at 12:18
  • Probably superuser, not sure. – Rui F Ribeiro Jan 02 '19 at 13:42

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