searching for a specific kind of update

Unless you are after the intellectual satisfaction of solving the problem, don't waste valuable minutes you will never get back, just buy something that is better supported and works well.

What do you suggest?

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

What exactly are these “updates”? Kernel modules? Userland drivers?

Probably kernel modules. Right now lsusb identifies the wifi device as Bus 001 Device 040: ID 2357:012d TP-Link Archer T3U [Realtek RTL8812BU]

Running dmesg through grep wlan0 finds [1549933.629235] rtw_8822bu 1-1.5.2:1.0 wlan0: disabling HT/VHT/HE as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP

The wifi dongle works but not well. When the wireless connection gets dodgy the entire USB system, including keyboard and trackpad, slow to the point that the machine can't be controlled and must be power-cycled.

If I try bob@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo apt search rtw_8822bu Sorting... Done Full Text Search... Done

nothing is found, not even the existing driver.

Am I looking with the wrong tool?

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

"modinfo rtw_8822bu" will give you some info on the driver, though no direct info on how it was installed. On Debian (not RPiOS) I see there are similar modules starting with "rtw88_" installed with the base, but no "rtw_8822bu.ko". rtw88 apparantly supports your TP-Link Archer T3U RTL8812BU device:

If so, maybe you just need to blacklist the rtw_8822bu driver to use them? Unless the rtw88 driver is used already and it wrongly logs as "rtw_8822bu", in which case the "modinfo rtw_8822bu" command will fail, and look at the output of "lsmod" to see exactly which "rtw" module/s are being used.

Also make sure you have the package "firmware-realtek" installed and up to date.

Could that be more of a power issue? Dongle draws more power and your PSU can't keep up? I remember the early Pis had some questionable design WRT power, basically you'd want your PSU to be able to provide something like 5.2 volts.

From what I gather the 5.2 volt requirement applies to Pi5 with internal WiFi. This is a Pi2B with no internal WiFi.

The dongle is on a powered hub (part of a Dell monitor with a built-in hub). The hub is putting out 5.12 volts with the WiFi dongle active. The WiFi dongle is on a short USB-A extension cable to allow positioning for best reception, which varies wildly over a few inches.

There's a fairly clear correlation between WiFi signal quality declining and the keyboar/trackpad becoming unresponsive. It tends to happen in the evening and I'm guessing it's interference with neighbor's access points, which are abundant.

It does appear that the firmware-realtek package can be upgraded, but trying sudo apt upgrade realtek-firmware reported that upgrade does not take arguments.

It appears that I need to use sudo apt install --only-upgrade firmware-realtek but I haven't tried it yet. Can anybody confirm this is the correct command? I'd rather not alter anything else right now.

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

The obvious way to narrow this down would be to try a wired keyboard and mouse, as alternatives to your wireless ones.

Alway try to reduce the number of variables involved.