On Mon, Sep 05, 2016 at 10:49:08AM +0200, Hanno Zulla wrote:

Hi,

sorry for asking a possibly obvious question, but:

Why is support for Cherry Trail / Bay Trail so bad in the mainline kernel? Is this being worked on? And where can one help or track the progress with improving this?

Works for me! :)

Recently, I bought a Win10 netbook to install Linux on. It's a beautiful small device with a fanless Z3735F CPU. Just right for my kids as their first own computer.

After using Intel hardware since several years without a hitch, it was surprising to find this not being fully supported by current 2016 Linux distributions.

The Wifi is not running at all, lost the network with a Wifi stick that works fine on RPi and the system freezes every now and then for no reproducible reasons. Googling around, all I found were similar complaints by other Linux users and a confusing array of incomplete third-party driver projects not ready for mainline, like this one:

https://github.com/hadess/rtl8723bs/issues/96

That is not an Intel part, not much Intel can do here about that. I suggest asking about this device on the linux-wireless mailing list, the developers there can help you as they are working on a cleaned up driver for that chip.

Also, there's a litany of "don't buy Cherry Trail or Bay Trail devices for Linux" articles, which probably would have been helpful to read before buying that fateful device.

And almost all of those are wrong :) Almost all Android tablets shipping right now are BayTrail devices, so it is a working platform for Linux.

This is sad to watch. I tried to find a different device for my kids, but all of the netbook-like devices on the market now share this problem. A whole generation of very interesting devices appears to be lost for Linux users.

Is there hope for this device class or does one have to stick to Core i CPUs for the time being?

All you have is an issue with a non-Intel wifi chip? What else is wrong? Have you filed bugs for this with your distro-of-choice? thanks, greg k-h