Where would I look for a list of what network chips are supported in any given kernel? I’m looking to build my first computer designed from the ground up for Linux and want to be sure that the Ethernet port and WiFi chip will work without needing to do anything special.
I just stick with Intel, Mellanox or Aquantia for wired networking and Intel or Qualcomm for wireless - those are always safe bets. Realtek is extremely hit and miss, I’d drop a cheap Intel NIC in the machine rather than relying on the onboard realtek.
That’s generally my mindset but the motherboard price jumps up quite a bit for one that has only Intel. Every other board has a Realtek chip on either the Ethernet or WiFi.
I just chuck an add in NIC in and ignore the onboard LAN hardware. Wireless is usually an m.2 board and easily replaced as well. Total cost there is like $30 for both if you pick both up on fleaBay.
It’s a mini iTX board so I won’t have room for an extra network card. Yes I could swap WiFi chips as it’s a daughter board but then I come back to the issue of what works with Linux
We’ve had seemingly endless support issues with mediatek WiFi over the last 2-3y in the asus-linux community. Most people have either pulled their mediatek cards and replaced them with intel or have just gotten used to rebooting every time they have a mediatek driver issue.
On the wikidevi ru site it lists the chip I’m interested in, the Realtek RTL8852CE. What am I looking for in the tables that indicate it works with a said kernel?
It looks like there’s no devices listed for that chipset yet. Assuming there were any, you would go to the device’s page and check the table on the right for something like “probable linux drivers”. If you want a plug and play experience you need to look for one where the drivers have been integrated into the kernel, and then make sure your system is using that kernel version or later. It’s usually older devices whose drivers have been brought into the kernel, you won’t find newer stuff that just works out of the box.
If you don’t want to limit yourself to the ones with kernel drivers you’ll usually be downloading the driver’s source code from somewhere, then set up dkms to build and install them on every kernel update.
It’s honestly not as bad as it sounds if you don’t mind researching for a bit and running a couple commands.
It’s much easier to lookup for info on hardware when you’ve got vendor/product ID or line from lsusb/lspci.
As far as my quick googling goes, one user asked for help on Linux Mint forums as the Wifi wasn’t detected by default. They advised them to upgrade kernel to a newer version and the problem was solved.
Interestingly, there’s that post on HP forums about Windows driver quality being crap and the card actually working better on Linux with its unofficial driver xD h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/…/9031507
The kernel driver for the RTL8852CE wireless card is driver rtw8852ce. This means that the driver is mainline, so it should work out of the box. Going to the git log for this particular driver, we can see it’s initial work was as added back in 2022-03-10, therefore it’s safe to assume that any Kernel released after that point will work. However, seeing that the latest fix was made in 2024-02-01, I highly recommend using any kernel after that date for the best experience. That said, go to releases and take a look at the chart; according to the chart and the previous information, you should be good with any Linux Kernel 6.1+. Heading back to the main page, the drivers you should be looking at are LTS (longterm) 6.1.87 and above, while I recommend stable 6.8.7+ for the lastest patches made to this driver.
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