this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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You need to if your device isn't officially supported. This is pretty common for USB wifi cards.
There's a DB of officially supported cards , and if your card isn't there then you have to look up for a driver.
Usually they're fairly easy to find with just googling.
On one side it is a rare sight to need to install a driver for Linux. I had an Star NL24-10 printer with an IEEE-488 connector for the C64.
INSANE! Linux natively supports C64 peripherals.
I build a simple adaptor from Parallel to IEEE-488-Serial and when I told CUPS the printer was on /dev/ieee488 it immediately found it. Insane. Oh, the Floppy was also available, at least at sector Level though there actually is no C1541 Filesystem so I had to open it in Starcommander, some sort of Norton/Midnite-Commander, which officially supports those images.
The amount of supported hardware is INSANE. You will get stuff working which works nowhere else.
The coolest shit are Host-Based Storage Systems, with the most known group as Memory-Technology-Devices. For example there are SMR-Harddisks where I can change the SMR-Layout from my computer. I can say "50% capacity CMR, 50% SMR". Or Host-Based-QLC-Drives where you can select for each MinWriteCell how to use it: As ultra-Fast SLC/MLC, as the middle TLC or as the superslow QLC. Sure, it costs Capacity. But the choice ist yours. I bought a Data-Center-Intel-QLC-Drive and converted it to 50% MLC at 3.5GByte/s sustained and 50% QLC with 0.5Gbyte/s. Sure, it reduced the capacity of the 4TByte Drive to 3TByte. But who cares if it is so fast it blows anything away. On Windows you can not even detect those drives.
But: If you have a really bad case of "unsupported hardware" then things get complicated fast.
Unsupported hardware is a really big issue when you encounter it. I used a WiFi driver for a broadcom USB Wi-Fi card and it was one of the worst experiences I've had. Constant disconnections. Sometimes it wouldn't even connect. Learned a lot about systemd, network manager, services but really was painful because I used that computer for work.
What do you use to manage SSD/HDD management like that? I just reinstalled Arch and would love to mess with this.
Beware: Those MTD-Stuff does NOT work with consumer stuff. Highend-MTD is practically not existing for consumers because Windows doesn't support them anyway.
If you check the Linux Kernel Frontend you'll find a section about "MTD devices". There are some userspace programs listed for managing the kernel components. Those tools are somewhat good for Host Based SMR hard drives but you might need tools to unlock the drives which I didn't need because they got unlocked at work. Those HDs are only sold to data centers. The two I have at home are from work and it is a miracle they let me have them at all.
Flash based MTD though is sometimes available but not in normal computing. Because SATA, NVMe, eMMC are actually "to advanced" for that stuff. MTD is VERY Low-Level. The driver does everything, buffering, moving from MLC to QLC, refreshing cells and so on. For me it is a PCIE-Card with absolutely no intelligence but a very fat driver. But you might also find it in old Linux/Android-Based phones, Netbooks and Tablets though current smart phones use "smarter" storage like eMMC. Iphones have MTD but you can not get Linux to run on them.
Very interesting, thanks for the info. I may have to piece together an ebay server to mess around with some of it.
Good Luck. I haven't seen those drive ANYWHERE outside Amazon and Microsoft backend Systems. Technically speaking they weren't even from "Servers" but from "SAN" systems.
On Arch they're usually right in the AUR. I imagine there's people adding them to the new AUR-like Debian repo which name I can't remember rn.
If it's not in the Kernel, write a driver and upstream it. Be a man.
And this is a clear example of how to keep people away from Linux, nothing push more people out of a community than shamming.
Easier said than done. I did want to look into writing wifi drivers but imo these are the most difficult drivers to write code for.
Facts, they can be a huge pain due to manufacturers not providing proper documentation; essentially forcing you to reverse engine the driver from scratch.
It's not only that but wifi protocols are very complicated and if you look up datasheets you'll likely just find documents in chinese.
Yeah, because companies like Realtek & Mediatek are Taiwanese/Chinese.
Ofc