add more RTW88 / RTW89 modules

[macmpi]

Describe the bug

There are some quite popular Realtek-based USB dongles out there (like RTL8851BU/8831BU) that are now well covered under kernel drivers: would be nice to include them as modules (to avoid RAM penalty to most) in all defconfigs.
Thanks for consideration.

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

plug-in USB RTL8851BU dongle: no wifi

Device (s)

Raspberry Pi Zero

System

Linux 6.12.13-0-rpi #1-Alpine Thu Feb 13 22:14:30 UTC 2025 armv6l Linux

Logs

No response

Additional context

No response

[pelwell]

How about a PR?

[Yao-Wen-Chang]

I got the same problem, but on my laptop. Not sure if this repo would be helpful
https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89.

[macmpi]

As of kernel 6.5 many base drivers are part of kernel distribution.
I guess lwfinger may supersede/complement some, and may be installed by user if need be.

@pelwell I can't built&test for a little while, but was thinking sth along the line of (maybe some could be trimmed-out, while Pi5 may use PCI ones):

CONFIG_RTW88=m
CONFIG_RTW88_CORE=m
CONFIG_RTW88_PCI=m
CONFIG_RTW88_USB=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8822B=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8822C=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8723X=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8723D=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8821C=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8822BE=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8822BS=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8822BU=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8822CE=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8822CS=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8822CU=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8723DE=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8723DS=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8723CS=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8723DU=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8821CE=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8821CS=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8821CU=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8821AU=m
CONFIG_RTW88_8812AU=m
CONFIG_RTW88_LEDS=y
CONFIG_RTW89=m
CONFIG_RTW89_CORE=m
CONFIG_RTW89_PCI=m
CONFIG_RTW89_8852A=m
CONFIG_RTW89_8852B_COMMON=m
CONFIG_RTW89_8852B=m
CONFIG_RTW89_8852C=m
CONFIG_RTW89_8851BE=m
CONFIG_RTW89_8852AE=m
CONFIG_RTW89_8852BE=m
CONFIG_RTW89_8852BTE=m
CONFIG_RTW89_8852CE=m
CONFIG_RTW89_8922AE=m

[macmpi]

as for RTL8851BU (and other rtw89 USB), there's some positive outlook upstream:

[macmpi]

For records for those interested, preview of upcoming (for 6.17 maybe) rtw89 kernel drivers (RTL8851BU & al) are now available below for testing (dkms):
https://github.com/morrownr/rtw89/