I have been trying to run the bookworm minimal image for the Radxa Rock 2F with poor results. Wifi stops working after an "armbian-upgrade" and after apt upgrade.  Doing an nmcli -p r results in WIFI-HW missing response. It seems to me that after the upgrade, something is wrong with the aic8800 driver module. Unfortunately I am too ignorant to be of much help, but any suggestions would be most  welcome.

 

Thank you.

moved

On 3/2/2025 at 2:11 AM, rpq399 said:

with poor results

 

This is not Armbian fault by any means. When you buy hardware, you mainly support hardware designers. Proper software support, that is yet to be developed by projects such as ours (with or without collaboration with hardware makers). This board was added to the Armbian build framework by vendor last week (!), which means its support is basic, bugs are expected and it only have community support status ATM: https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Board-Support-Rules/ 

 

On 3/2/2025 at 2:11 AM, rpq399 said:

something is wrong with the aic8800

Probably this will fix it.

https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/7903

 

 

Thanks Igor. Will see what I can do🙂

Finally able to solve the problem.  The aic8800 wifi modules and others associated with the wifi driver are deleted when upgrading the kernel.

I found Debian packages on radxa's github site downloaded the firmware and usb modules and then reinstalled them from the /tmp directory

after kernel upgrade but before rebooting.  

While this does work, it is a sloppy hack.  It seems to me that there ought to be some way to retain the wifi drivers on upgrade, but it will take a more knowledgeable person to do that.

The same hack allows the wifi on the Rock-2A to survive a kernel upgrade.  Wired Ethernet of the Rock-2A survives a kernel upgrade without issue.

@rpq399

HI! Can you share links to firmware and usb modules  and the way to reinstall before the reboot, please?

https://github.com/radxa-pkg/aic8800/releases/tag/4.0+git20250410.b99ca8b6-2

 

The above should get you to a useable page. Download the USB version of the .deb package. I stored mine in the /root but had to copy it to the /tmp directory and install it from there. I installed the .deb package after the apt upgrade process, then rebooted.  There may be a more recent version of the package. If I find it, I'll post a link 

Hope this helps, let me know if you run into trouble.

Have just tested Forky (Debian) release on both the 2A and the 2F, and in both cases the wireless driver survived an upgrade.  I also tested the Plucky release on the 2A, and the wireless driver did not survive the stock upgrade.  I have not tested the Plucky version on the 2F yet. Also it should be noted that the cron implementation in the Forky version for the 2A is fouled up.  Any ordinary user's crontab has to be edited by root.  Bad permissions on a number of files.  Nice to know that at least the wireless adapter problem has attracted someone's interest.