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RTL8852BE WiFi adapter on Debian 12 Bookworm
The Realtek WiFi Network Controller RTL8852BE is not supported by the 6.1.0 Linux kernel shipped with Debian 12 Bookworm. In this page you can find the steps required to compile and install the required kernel module and firmware.
- Disable the Secure Boot in BIOS.
- Compile the rtw89-dkms Debian package into a chroot environment.
- Install the rtw89-dkms package into the target host, it will compile and install the kernel modules,
- Download and install the rtw8852b_fw-1.bin firmware.
A self compiled kernel module is strictly tied to the running kernel, so it must be re-compiled whenever the kernel package is upgraded. The official Debian kernel is properly signed, so it runs even if the Secure Boot option is enabled into the BIOS. But the self compiled kernel module is a non-trusted software running at kernel level, so it requires that the Secure Boot into the BIOS to be disabled.
Debian provides the Dynamic Kernel Module Support, which automatically recompiles all DKMS modules if a new kernel version is installed. This allows drivers and devices outside of the mainline kernel to continue working after a Linux kernel upgrade
Creating the chroot environment
It is possible to create a DKMS source package for the rtw_8852be kernel module starting from the recent Realtek driver sources. This operation requires the installation of several packages; if you don't want to clutter the target host, you can do this task on a different host or into a chroot environment.
Using the debootstrap command (from the Debian package of the same name) it is possibile to initialize a separate (chroot) environment for this task. The target host will not be cluttered by the packages installed into the chroot environment and the resulting DKMS package can be used on several target hosts. The drawback is that you will consume about 1.2 Gb of disk space.
mkdir -p /usr/local/src/chroot/dkms debootstrap bookworm /usr/local/src/chroot/dkms http://deb.debian.org/debian/
Creating the dkms source package into the chroot
chroot /usr/local/src/chroot/dkms
apt install locales dpkg-reconfigure locales apt install dh-dkms debhelper build-essential devscripts git-build-recipe
cd /usr/local/src git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89.git cd /usr/local/src/rtw89 git clean -xfd git deborig HEAD dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc