Will the external module support be dropped with the release of LE 10?

1st Official Post

    Hi,

    I am a long time very happy user of the formerly OE and now the LE project on my Raspberry Pi2. It works really well. However I am often travelling and my only option then is to connect the media center over wifi to a network. As chewit suggests in many threads I have considered investing to a wifi to ethernet adapter however most take up a significant amount of space and I already have an awful realtek based dongle that just works for me perfectly. Sadly there was no support for the module so I ended up compiling it myself for each new release, but that's fine.

    However I came across a few posts from 2019 where chewit stated the external kernel module support will be completely dropped with the release of LE 10. Is that really the case? Why is that step necessary? I believe many users would be disappointed if that would happen. Many dvb and wifi dongles would stop working....

    Thanks

    • Official Post

    There are no plans to remove the current limited number of realtek modules (or to add more). If we do remove a module it will be because we can switch to an in-kernel module. Some of the older Realtek cards are supported in-kenrel now, but the drivers still aren't great and Pi Foundation feels there are too many older Pi users with the official adapter for us to switch. Realtek are more actively engaged in upstreaming support for latest/next chips now so in the future the situation will improve for new devices, but I suspect there will always be a gap for recent-past and older cards.

    Ah that's good to know. So the external kernel module loading will not be disabled.

    Is there any reason why force unloading of modules is not enabled tho?

    Thanks for your quick reply!