Hi all, as noted in Bluetooth Dongles tested on MOD Devices, I have a T-P Link AC 600 (aka Archer T2UB Nano” combined Bluetooth 4.2/WiFi USB dongle) - the Bluetooth part works fine on my Dwarf but I have not been able to make the WiFi part work - I share my notes here in the hope that this is useful to someone, if for no other reason than to tell them not to buy this dongle for WiFi use.
I am running firmware v1.13.2.3174 on my Dwarf:
Linux moddwarf 6.1.15-rt7-moddwarf #10 SMP PREEMPT_RT Wed Jun 28 10:41:02 UTC 2023 aarch64 GNU/Linux
When I plug in the dongle, the following text appears in dmesg:
[ 113.514220] usb 1-1.1: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci-platform
[ 113.618442] usb 1-1.1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=c820, bcdDevice= 2.00
[ 113.618466] usb 1-1.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 113.618475] usb 1-1.1: Product: 802.11ac NIC
[ 113.618481] usb 1-1.1: Manufacturer: Realtek
[ 113.618487] usb 1-1.1: SerialNumber: 123456
[ 113.629023] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: examining hci_ver=08 hci_rev=000c lmp_ver=08 lmp_subver=8821
[ 113.630483] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: rom_version status=0 version=1
[ 113.630509] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8821c_fw.bin
[ 113.634572] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8821c_config.bin
[ 113.636221] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: cfg_sz 10, total sz 34926
[ 114.132149] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: fw version 0x75b8f098
[ 114.198618] Bluetooth: MGMT ver 1.22
Note that the Bluetooth driver loads the rtl8821c firmware while I think the dongle really has an rtl8821au chipset. ( Realtek chipset page )
When following the instructions in the Wiki WiFi page
[root@moddwarf ~]# systemctl restart wpa-supplicant-wlan0 dhcpcd-wlan0
A dependency job for wpa-supplicant-wlan0.service failed. See 'journalctl -xe' for details.
A dependency job for dhcpcd-wlan0.service failed. See 'journalctl -xe' for details.
I note that it takes some time (maybe a minute or two) before the command provides any output.
The tail end of journalctl output is:
Jan 01 00:34:35 moddwarf systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan0.device.
Jan 01 00:34:35 moddwarf systemd[1]: Dependency failed for DHCP for wlan0.
Jan 01 00:34:35 moddwarf systemd[1]: Job dhcpcd-wlan0.service/start failed with result 'dependency'.
Jan 01 00:34:35 moddwarf systemd[1]: Dependency failed for WPA supplicant for wlan0.
Jan 01 00:34:35 moddwarf systemd[1]: Job wpa-supplicant-wlan0.service/start failed with result 'dependency'.
Jan 01 00:34:35 moddwarf systemd[1]: Job sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan0.device/start failed with result 'timeout'.
This all seems very similar to the output reported by @CreativeLemming although I note that his idProduct=c811 while mine is c820 so it is not exactly the same device.
Using dmesg | tail I do not see any new output at all, which surprises me. There is certainly no sign of any attempt to load firmware.
Reading around on other fora, I see now that I should perhaps have been a little more careful in my choice of dongle. In particular, it seems that multi-function BT/WiFi dongles are rather more problematic than single-function ones. So, just to be clear, while it would be cool if this worked (having a single, tiny dongle that allows both BT and WiFi access to the Dwarf seems pretty flexible) it is not a showstopper for me.