[leothrix]

@mm interesting, thank you for the report. Are you using the card in AP mode, or just as a wireless client? If it’s working smoothly on 5Ghz in AP mode that may be the best/only option for a 5GHz access point.

[leothrix]

@tom.i, I tried to use that with all of the aforementioned cards without success, unfortunately.

However, I can report that the latest Arch Linux ARM kernel release for the espressobin does work with the RTL8191SE card mentioned on the wiki, I’ve tested AP mode over 802.11n successfully.

This is definitely an improvement, and works sufficiently well to function as a wireless router for now. Hopefully some progress can be made for ath9k and ath10k-based cards, as attempting to use those still just results with kernel panics at boot time.

[leothrix]

I’ve gotten a hold of a RTL8191SEvB card, which the PCIe bus recognizes, but still won’t show up as a valid network interface:

[root@host ~]# lshw -short
H/W path  Device  Class      Description
========================================
                  system     Marvell Armada 3720 Community Board
/0                bus        Motherboard
/0/1              processor  cpu
/0/2              processor  cpu
/0/3              memory     925MiB System memory
/0/0              network    RTL8191SEvB Wireless LAN Controller
/2        usb3    bus        xHCI Host Controller
/3        usb2    bus        xHCI Host Controller
/1        usb1    bus        EHCI Host Controller
/4        lan1    network    Ethernet interface
/5        br0     network    Ethernet interface
/6        lan0    network    Ethernet interface
/7        wan     network    Ethernet interface
/8        eth0    network    Ethernet interface
[root@host ~]# rfkill list all
[root@host ~]# iw list
[root@host ~]#

Based upon the replies to this thread, it would appear that there are no known PCIe cards that work on the espressobin. This post by @Bryan seems to suggest that a compatible Marvell card is forthcoming, but to be completely honest I’m skeptical given that the official wiki purports that this Realtek card is compatible as well, but nobody has been able to make it work successfully.

Having tried unsuccessfully to make a few Realtek, ath10k, and ath9k cards work, I’m curious whether anyone from globalscale/marvell would like to chime in to clarify the situation, otherwise it would appear that the espressobin is dead in the water when it comes to wifi over PCIe.

[leothrix]

Thanks for the info, it’s very useful to get others’ experience with the board as well.

@tekrantz, do you have a working kernel .config you’d be willing to share in a gist or something similar? I’m attempting to run against a custom 4.12 compilation as well but am getting kernel panics and would like a working .config against the 4.12 tree to compare against.

@glasgall, I’ve come across some of your other posts regarding recompiling the kernel with PCIe wifi support and wanted to confirm whether my thought process is correct here – in the current state for the espressobin, is it possible or not to recompile a 4.4.8/4.4.52 kernel (in order to get some additional kernel features) and still have functional wifi over the PCIe interface? It sounds like the pre-built ubuntu rootfs that’s provided has functional wifi over PCIe, but we may be stuck with the stock kernel if we want wifi over PCIe since there’s no sources for those drivers? Is it possible to build a custom 4.4.8/4.4.52 image and manually load the built kernel modules from the stock rootfs into a custom kernel?

[leothrix]

I’m in the same boat; would be interested to hear if anyone has found a working config on the current mainline that can work with the MMC.

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