Samsung ARM Chromebook and AX88179 USB 3 ethernet adapter

[radix00]

Hello all,

I have been a light arch user for years and this is my first move into alarm. I have arch up an running just fine on my Samsung ARM Chromebook but I require a USB ethernet adapter. I got a USB 3 adapter based on the AX88179 chipset. I figured it would be kinda nice to use USB 3 because the Exynos 5 is the only ARM chipset I know of with USB 3. I also kinda have this crazy idea of using a Samsung Chromebook with a broken screen as a home server but need full GigE for that, not some crippled USB 2 adapter. The AX88179 chipset support was added to kernel 3.9 and works just plug and play on my x86 arch box. Of course till now I did not know that alarm was not using the latest kernel (it seems to be using 3.4 from the Chromium OS project) and thus the AX88179 does not work. There seems to be some intrest in back porting the 3.9 driver to 3.4 for ChromeOS here https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.or ... 1Ee4sM1ZGc but there has been no movement in months. So here is my question, how would I go about getting the AX88179 running on alarm? Is there an alarm 3.9 kernel? How would I compile the driver from source? Thanks for any help you can provide, I am still new to this!

[kmihelich]

We don't have a newer kernel for it because the mainline kernel doesn't have full support for everything yet.

[WarheadsSE]

Well, we are using a latest proved working for all kernel. ARM devices don't always have support all the way out to 3.11+

[stronnag]

The device works fine (I have one) if you build the module. I tend to cross compile the whole kernel from the Chromeos repo (otherwise my BT mouse don't work ....), and also cross-compile the AX88179 module as well. It is also easy to compile the module on the device against the distro alarm kernel. I think the module is also in the AUR, and you may be able to "makepkg -Ai".

[WarheadsSE]

Our kernel is based off theirs at this point btw.

[stronnag]

I know that, I also know my home build works better for me (anecdotally better network performance, and the blue tooth mouse works). I'd prefer to use the default kernel any day.

[WarheadsSE]

Better network performance, how so?

[stronnag]

With the alarm kernel, I get frequent pauses (which I think has been discussed in the main Chromebook thread), and dropouts with the USB3 adaptor (this is usually resolved by removing and re-inserting the interface). With a self built kernel, I don't see these artefacts. Don't know why, and I admit to not really having spent time looking at it. Usually it's a case of install alarm kernel from a pacman update, reboot, see network stalls or failure (wlan or usb3), no BT mouse. git pull and cross-compile a new kernel, install, reboot, no more problems. Sorry it's more scientific. I'll try harder to provide a more factual account next kernel update.