Does anyone know of some cheap linux-incompatible hardware i could use to practice writing kernel-drivers for?

Everything I have currently works oob with linux, or is made by nvidia (graphics is a bit too crazy for me for now)

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@lucydev Those cheap WiFi 6 dongles on AliExpress? Quite a few of them have chips that are either partially supported (Bluetooth only) or unsupported in the kernel. If you get a few different <$5 ones you're likely to have at least some that don't work OOTB.

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@lucydev Oh, alternatively some older scanners, I believe some of the CanoScan devices still don't work under Linux (not sure if that's a kernel driver thing though?) and they're usually everywhere on classifieds sites

@joepie91 do you have a specific example you could drop here as a reply? I looked around but so far ive only found some with chipsets supported by the kernel

that sounds interesting!

@lucydev Sure - an example would be 0bda:b851, which is an RTL8821CU; it does have a Bluetooth driver, but not a WiFi driver (at least last time I checked).

@joepie91 there is a barely documented driver from Realtek for the RTL8821CU in the source tree (github.com/torvalds/linux/blob). Would you be able to supply a device/model name or possibly an aliexpress link so i can get my hands on the hardware? Sadly, I wasn't able to find the device that corresponds to ID 0bda:b851 ;-;

Maybe I can try finding out what the issue is and hack a bit on the driver. It's entirely possible, that the driver just doesn't recognize the usb device ID, since they have a hardcoded list of device IDs and 0xb851 isn't contained (see attached screenshot).

I could also make a patch and send it to ya, if you're interested in testing the theory. Iterating would be easier with the actual hardware tho :neofox_woozy:

@lucydev This is the 0bda:b851 device that I have: aliexpress.com/item/1005006960

I also have aliexpress.com/item/1005005362 which at least on latest NixOS stable does not seem to be detected, and 2 years ago someone else reported that it wasn't supported: reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments

@joepie91 thanks for the link!

Yeah that checks out. This driver has a very short commit history, the earliest being the inclusion based on some out-of-tree source to support the chipset in December 2022.

hey @joepie91,

itll take until the 20th/22nd before the dongle arrives, and i am on vacation the week after. If you want, you can apply my patch to linux mainline and test it out yourself: gitlab.com/-/snippets/4780651

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