# Realtek 8180 wlan - which driver is best?

## labba

Hi!

I'd like to use my rtl8180 based wlan nic with gentoo. AFAIK there are three different drivers:

- ndiswrapper with the windows driver

- the binary driver from realtek

- the sourceforge GPL driver

The driver should support WPA and monitoring mode would be cool, too  :Smile: 

Suggestions?

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## techie705

Me too, I have the same chip.   :Very Happy: 

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## Thargor

There is also a second GPL-driver on sourceforge, because the original author stopped working on http://rtl8180-sa2400.sourceforge.net and nobody had write-access to the svn, some people forked it to http://rtl-wifi.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_Page and added patches to make it compile with newer kernels (note, that the first driver (the one in portage) does not compile with 2.6.20)

A disadvantage of the forked driver is, that they have not released anything yet, so you can just checkout the svn-repository.

I have a rtl8180 too (on my dad's laptop  :Very Happy:  ), so maybe I'll try out the new driver soon.

At the moment I am running the old driver with a patch I found somewhere here in the forums, to make it wk with 2.6.20 and it runns just fine (apart from some disconnects from time to time)

EDIT: I just found the ebuild I am currently using. You can get it here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-3898998.html#3898998

Works fine for me, but does only(!) compile on 2.6.20 (and later?<-- not tested)

Greets Benedikt

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## labba

Thanks for this hint, Thargor!

Can you tell us if WPA is working with the driver?

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## Thargor

I have not tried WPA since my access-point does not suport it. So no I can't say anything about it.

I edited my post above, so maybe you could try it on your own, if you need it.

Greets Benedikt

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## labba

Ah, cool! Thank you  :Smile: 

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## Thargor

I just found out, that the new driver is already ported to the mac80211 wireless-stack and that it maybe will soon get into the vanilla kernel (maybe 2.6.23 or 2.6.24 - just guessing). 

There is already a mac80211 based rtl8187 driver in the mm-patchset, so there really is something going on.

Off topic: By the way, rt2x00 drivers are also in morton's kernel - yeah! (I also got a ralink rt2500 pci wireless card  :Very Happy:  )

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## techie705

Thank  you, Thargor.   :Wink: 

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## labba

 *Thargor wrote:*   

> I just found out, that the new driver is already ported to the mac80211 wireless-stack and that it maybe will soon get into the vanilla kernel (maybe 2.6.23 or 2.6.24 - just guessing). 
> 
> 

 

Hmm, that sounds interesting. If I got this right that would mean that WPA would definitely work, since it is done by mac80211 and not by the driver itself, right?

How did you find out? Using sources from cvs and a 2.6.22 development kernel?

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## Thargor

 *labba wrote:*   

> How did you find out? Using sources from cvs and a 2.6.22 development kernel?

 

well...no  :Wink: 

I just read it here and did

```
emerge mm-sources

eselect kernel set linux-2.6.22-rc1-mm1

cd /usr/src/linux

make menuconfig
```

I'm not sure when mac80211 based drivers will get into vanilla, but I read something about maybe 2.6.23 or 2.6.24

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## labba

 *Thargor wrote:*   

> 
> 
> well...no 
> 
> I just read it here and did
> ...

 

Hehe ok, that sounds quite logical  :Wink:  Thanks anyway, I will try if it works wit mm-sources if I got some more time...

Any experiences welcome  :Very Happy: 

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## aussiemale

Any chance someone can verify whether any of the available rtl8180 drivers are now supporting WPA/WPA2.  Looks like there is a lot of "Theoretical" claims of support but no proof of anyone getting it to work for real.

If any of you have got it working please pass on the details of your success in this post for posterity.

Thanks in Advance!

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## symx

 *aussiemale wrote:*   

> Any chance someone can verify whether any of the available rtl8180 drivers are now supporting WPA/WPA2.  Looks like there is a lot of "Theoretical" claims of support but no proof of anyone getting it to work for real.
> 
> 

 

I used the open source drivers but I was only able to set wep keys.

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## Junghans

The linux kernel (>=2.6.25) contains a driver module for rtl8180 and rtl8185 (rtl8180) based on the mac stack.

It works for me with wpa2.

The only problem: it sometimes hangs at poweroff/reboot.

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