We were forced to upgrade the kernel version for Raspberry PI, in order to support the latest model of Raspberry PI 4 v 1.5.
Unfortunately, for those newer kernels, there are no pre-built wi-fi drivers for dongles not already supported by PI. Those were built by a third-party which just stopped providing them.
We tried to support latest PI 1.5 by doing some tricks to retain wi-fi drivers, but it did not ultimately work.
So, we needed to make the choice: upgrade the kernel to support latest PI 4, or drop some wi-fi driver support. Considering that in the future we would have needed to upgrade the kernel anyway, we went for the first choice.
Of course, we could build and maintain those drivers ourselves, but it requires a substantial amount of work which we cannot handle at the moment, and we prefer to prepare a list of supported dongles that you can get if in need.
Small input from my side: on my way to the supermarket I passed a Conrad store and decided to check for available WIFI-Dongles and bought 2 cheap (sub 10€) dongles:
At home I found, that both have the RTL8188EUS chipset (thought one had a RALINK chipset in the store) which I can confirm to work :-).
As I only need one dongle: if someone (within Europe) wants the LogiLink send me a PM. It goes a little hard into the USB Port but works without problems.
I found its the same for me in the meantime, as I wrote here:
Works for some hours and then stops working…usually I only use the PI2 for a short period of time and always turn it off (as it is in a room I don´t listen to music a lot), so didn´t notice it before…
There does not seem to be a way that we can support the Wi-Fi drivers that got missing in the new kernel. Unfortunately you will have to get a new dongle.
and voila, it worked.
I have no knowledge about your build system but this repo and the others used by libreelec is very much working with newer kernels.
