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Comment by mattst88 | Hacker News Reader

I've always been confused by the situation with Realtek Linux drivers.

Does anyone know why they are not contributing to the kernel directly? (Just a guess: their drivers are from the same codebase as the Windows driver and use a bunch of abstraction layers that wouldn't be acceptable in Linux)

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Realtek does contribute directly to the kernel, but I think it depends on which internal team is handling the device support. For their PCIe 802.11ac and 802.11ax wifi cards Realtek devs wrote and upstreamed rtw88[1] and rtw89[2] respectively.

[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

Wasn't rtw88 supposed to abstract away the transport so it could be used with PCIe, USB and SDIO? [0] The later two never materialized (there is the out of tree rtw88-usb [1] but it's not very active and not maintained by Realtek)

[0] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

[1] https://github.com/ulli-kroll/rtw88-usb

I'm familiar with the Realtek RTL vendor driver codebase. It's a combination of two classics: a Realtek-specific hardware abstraction layer across a large number of their products (which won't fly in the Linux kernel), and abominable code quality (ditto).

Do they publish source code or binary drivers? If it's the latter, the article points at why they might not want their competitors to read their source code: the drivers matter a lot, and starting from theirs might well cut the development costs for a competing product in half.

Realtek drivers are GPL’d, but have a reputation (especially Wi-Fi dongles) of not following the coding standard of the Linux kernel and of low code quality, making them unacceptable for the upstream kernel. A driver often goes through a lengthy cleanup process by the community, first by existing as a “staging” driver in the kernel with incomplete features and unstable code, and later the code is gradually refactored before it’s finally official.

Source code and no BLOBs.

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