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HP Laptop Realtek rtl8852a wifi driver not starting

Linux Kernel, Network, and Services configuration.
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ole_thor
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HP Laptop Realtek rtl8852a wifi driver not starting

#1 Post by ole_thor »

I have an HP 17-cn1003ca laptop running Bullseye with all patches. It has a realtek rtl8852a wifi device that doesn't appear to start.
I have not found anywhere in the bios that says the wifi device is disabled.
I have installed the firmware-realtek package (firmware-realtek/stable,stable,now 20210315-3 all [installed], Binary firmware for Realtek wired/wifi/BT adapters). I have also installed firmware-misc-nonfree (firmware-misc-nonfree/stable,stable,now 20210315-3 all [installed]).
There are no errors or warnings in dmesg about the wifi. Following is the pertinent output from lspci -vv and iwconfig

Code: Select all

0000:01:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device a85a
	Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 88e2
	Control: I/O- Mem- BusMaster- SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
	Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
	Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 255
	IOMMU group: 12
	Region 0: I/O ports at 3000 [disabled] [size=256]
	Region 2: Memory at 54000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled] [size=1M]
sudo iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

enx00e04c0c0736  no wireless extensions.
The wifi is not working and I can't figure out why. I have found some references to compiling the driver but am reluctant to do it because the device is listed in the firmware-realtek info as included.
I am not an expert in debian so I am at a loss as to what to do next.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Ole Jensen.


ole_thor
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Re: HP Laptop Realtek rtl8852a wifi driver not starting

#3 Post by ole_thor »

arochester:
thanks for the quick response. I saw both those articles in my searches. I skipped the kernel version thing because I thought that being up to date with apt update had me covered, but I just learned that isn't the case. I am running 5.10.0-21-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.162-1 (2023-01-21) x86_64 GNU/Linux and the article says the driver is included in 5.16 so I will look into that.
I am reluctant to upgrade to a testing version because this is my wife's laptop and she is very confused by computers and doesn't handle change well.
Time for more research.
Thanks again

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Re: HP Laptop Realtek rtl8852a wifi driver not starting

#4 Post by arochester »

I am writing this on Testing. It is very much the same as Stable. but it just has a lot of Updates/Upgrades at the moment...

ole_thor
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Re: HP Laptop Realtek rtl8852a wifi driver not starting

#5 Post by ole_thor »

what version of the kernel is that?
I tried searching for 5.16 with this command: apt-cache search linux-image; all I got was 5.10
I decided to try the cheap dongle approach and got hung up trying to find one that would work with Bullseye (or linux in general - only windows and mac so far)


porschemad911
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Re: HP Laptop Realtek rtl8852a wifi driver not starting

#7 Post by porschemad911 »

Hi, I have a HP Victus 16 with this wifi chip, and it is working well under Bullseye with bullseye-backports enabled.

I installed a v6.0 kernel via the bullseye-backports linux-image-amd64 package.

I would also install the bullseye-backports firmware-realtek package. It looks like the bullseye package does include support for the RTL8852A, but the bullseye-backports package may have an updated version.

At the time I don't think the bullseye-backports firmware-realtek package existed, or I did not search well enough, because I manually updated the required firmware binaries from the upstream linux-firmware git repo. You could always do this if you have issues with any of the packaged versions. The relevant files are in the rtw89 and rtl_bt folder of the git repo, so I cloned the repo and copied the files into the right spots under /lib/firmware, overwriting / supplementing the files from the installed realtek-firmware package.

Cheers,

John

ole_thor
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Re: HP Laptop Realtek rtl8852a wifi driver not starting

#8 Post by ole_thor »

John (porschemad911).
Thanks for your post. I will look into the things that you did and see if I can do the same.
In the short term, I am going to install a $20 wifi dongle and get the laptop working again and then remove it when I get a more permanent solution (like yours) working.
Ole.

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Re: HP Laptop Realtek rtl8852a wifi driver not starting

#9 Post by porschemad911 »

ole_thor wrote: 2023-02-09 01:00more permanent solution
I would say that the best long-term solution is Debian 12 Bookworm, I am really looking forward to its release! It will remove the need for a whole bunch of tweaks I have done to my Bullseye + backports installation to get my hardware (particularly Navi GPUs and wifi chips) working smoothly and with the best possible performance, eg manually installing firmware from the upstream git repo, or compiling newer versions of Mesa with a build script like this for performance improvements and the ability to run more recent DXVK and Proton versions with wine / steam games.

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