Arch Linux

xworld

Member

Registered: 2012-05-27

Posts: 153

Questionable Performance and Realtek Drivers

Hello Arch forums. I had a question about Realtek wireless drivers. I have the Realtek 8188CE wireless adapter and it is my understanding that this driver isn't supported under linux. I do have a wifi connection, but in Linux it is not nearly as responsive as it is in Windows(I have a dual-boot).

iwconfig wlan0:

wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"******"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 00:1D:CF:5B:F7:00   
          Bit Rate=135 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr=2347 B   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=59/70  Signal level=-51 dBm  
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:83   Missed beacon:0

As you can see it's not the best signal ever. Every now and then when I ping I can get up to 33% packet loss.

mkinitcpio -M:

ac
ahci
asus_nb_wmi
atl1c
battery
button
coretemp
crc32c_intel
ehci_hcd
evdev
ghash_clmulni_intel
i2c_i801
i915
iTCO_wdt
intel_agp
joydev
kvm_intel
lpc_ich
mei
microcode
pcspkr
processor
psmouse
rtl8192ce   <<<
sd_mod
serio_raw
shpchp
snd_hda_intel
sr_mod
thermal
usbcore
uvcvideo
video
wmi
ext4

It appears as though the closest thing to 8188ce in linux is 8192ce. In the past I have installed rtl8192cu and it seems to offer a slight improvement. However, I noticed on the realtek website that any wireless drivers available are only supported up to kernel 3.2 so I'm not sure what driver I am supposed to be looking for that will offer better performance, since none of them seem to be supported under kernel 3.5.3. So I'm not sure what driver to look for. Is ndiswrapper the only option in this situation?

Last edited by xworld (2012-09-10 01:36:08)