On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 3:57 AM <oreg...@disroot.org> wrote: > > Long story short - Debian was tried. Wifi didn't work. Armbian Bullseye was > tried. WiFi worked. All was good, more or less, aside from guilt from sin of > using non-free hardware... But then, Distrowatch discussion of Raspberry PiOS > rolling out "an update to the distribution which installs a third-party > repository for Microsoft's VSCode packages" was observed coincident with > Armbian updates querying a new, non-Debian, site. Paranoia or conscience > motivated a return to Debian, Bullseye. > > Install, convoluted as it was, worked OK. Contrib and non-free were added to > /etc/apt/sources.list, despite the shame. firmware-realtek was installed to > get RTL8723BS firmware. > > Still no Wifi. Firmware is found: > > # find ./ -type f -iname rtl8723bs* > ./usr/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin > ./usr/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8723bs_nic.bin > ./usr/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8723bs_bt.bin > > Modprobe is attempted, but module is not found. > > # modprobe rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin > modprobe: FATAL: Module rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin not found in directory > /lib/modules/5.10.0-3-arm64
Can you check if armbian has the same kernel image? It's quite possible that they ship a kernel that is different from Debian's and that may have patches to fix driver bugs in the mainline kernel, or that enables additional modules. The mainline kernel only has a 'staging' driver for rtl8723bs, the module name is 'r8723bs.ko'. There are two other drivers for related hardware, the modern 'rtl8xxxu' that only supports USB style devices, and a cleaned-up version of the driver that is in staging, named 'rtlwifi' that also lacks support for rtl8723bs but supports some similar devices. There are also various out-of-tree drivers for realtek wireless devices that may have been included in armbian. Arnd