hi3518ev300: add an RTL8188EU profile with the driver in the kernel, and drop excludes firmware now handles (#157)

Follow-up to OpenIPC/firmware#2410, which left MT7601U as the only in-tree USB
Wi-Fi stack on hi3518ev300. RTL8188EU lands here as a camera profile, splitting
the two adapters across the two repositories.

hi3518ev300_lite_generic-rtl8188eu builds the driver INTO the kernel rather than
shipping it as a module: a profile whose only Wi-Fi is that driver has no reason
to carry it as loadable code, and the rootfs is the partition under pressure.
The out-of-tree rtl8188eus-openipc cannot make that move -- it is an external
kernel-module package, never linked into vmlinux -- so this uses the in-tree
staging driver at CONFIG_R8188EU=y through a variant kernel config, the same
shape as gk7205v200.generic-otg.config.

Built in, the driver also has no modprobe problem: as a module it was
unreachable, because /etc/wireless/usb's rtl8188eu-generic profile modprobes
'8188eu' while the in-tree module is 'r8188eu'. Linked into the kernel it binds
off its own USB device table at boot.

CONFIG_R8188EU selects WIRELESS_EXT, so the wext ABI firmware#2410 dropped comes
back on this variant only. It requests rtlwifi/rtl8188eufw.bin, so
linux-firmware-openipc comes with it. Registered in .github/firmware-drift.json
against the firmware blob it derives from.

MEASURED in CI, against the module-based version of the same profile:
  uImage           [1873KB/2048KB] -> [1991KB/2048KB]   56KB free
  rootfs.squashfs  [5084KB/5120KB] -> [4728KB/5120KB]  392KB free

Also drops excludes entries firmware now handles upstream: r8188eu.ko from
xiaomi-mjsxj02hl, and r8188eu.ko + scsi_mod.ko + sd_mod.ko from
yuancam-dgk423403. Both cameras build green; both run out-of-tree Realtek
drivers over nl80211 and are otherwise unaffected.

Not tested on a camera. This changes which 8188EU driver is used -- mainline
staging rather than the Realtek vendor fork -- so it wants confirmation that a
dongle is detected at boot without a modprobe, associates, and streams.

This commit is contained in:

Dmitry Ilyin

2026-09-13 16:39:33 +03:00

committed by

GitHub

parent ba182ac589

commit a225f75f6d

7 changed files with 2877 additions and 4 deletions

									
										.github/firmware-drift.json
									
		+7
		
												View File
												
				@@ -720,6 +720,13 @@

				      "blob": "d027af78c683d0cb625e94fb8b525d4d1d39466a",

				      "reconciled": "2026-08-25",

				      "note": "device-local copy of a firmware file"

				    },

				    {

				      "builder": "devices/hi3518ev300_lite_generic-rtl8188eu/br-ext-chip-hisilicon/board/hi3516ev200/hi3518ev300.generic-rtl8188eu.config",

				      "firmware": "br-ext-chip-hisilicon/board/hi3516ev200/hi3518ev300.generic.config",

				      "blob": "8534433dca5ef19f2132ad2d1f73f6f3e83ae1f5",

				      "reconciled": "2026-09-13",

				      "note": "rtl8188eu variant of the generic config: R8188EU=y instead of unset, which brings WIRELESS_EXT back; identical otherwise"

				    }

				  ],

				  "builder_only_symbols": {