AIC8800D80 Wi-Fi 6 Driver Notes for Radxa Cubie A5E (Linux 7.1 / Buildroot)

Cubie Series A5E
1

Below are notes on bringing up the AIC8800D80 SDIO Wi-Fi 6 chipset on the Radxa Cubie A5E (Allwinner T527) running Linux 7.1.

Instead of the vendor SDK driver, we used the wireless-next RFC v2 patch series (aic8800_bsp.ko + aic8800_fdrv.ko).

Key Technical Changes

  1. Firmware Path: Place firmware files (fw_patch_table_8800d80_u02.bin, fw_adid_8800d80_u02.bin, fw_patch_8800d80_u02.bin, fmacfw_8800d80_u02.bin) in /lib/firmware/aic8800/.

  2. Stack Protector Fix: Fixed a 4-byte buffer overflow in aicbt_patch_info_unpack() (aic_bsp_driver.c) by culling memcpy length to struct aicbt_patch_info_t bounds.

  3. SDIO Bus Sharing: Build with CONFIG_AIC8800_FDRV_NO_REG_SDIO=y so aic8800_fdrv.ko connects to the active aic8800_bsp.ko bus without SDIO driver registration collisions.

  4. Kernel 7.1 APIs: Updated netif_rx, cfg80211_probe_status, and remain_on_channel signatures.

Status

  • Hardware init and firmware load complete in <300ms (rd_version_val=06090101).

  • Interface wlan0 registers, acquires DHCP, and passes traffic normally.

The driver source tree and Buildroot package are available here: https://github.com/tcmichals/cubie-a5e (aic8800-upstream/)

2

Could you tell me if all of this is integrated into the scripts from your repository? Are you planning on publishing ready-made images? From what I’ve seen, you claim that the LAN, GPU, WiFi, and everything else is almost fully functional for the A5E. Can you confirm this?

3

Here is where I’m at:

  • Ethernet works
  • WiFi works (I’m updating the driver to be universal SDIO and USB) I’ve been struggling with the A7A Bridge chip. But I think I’m close. The end goal, RFC V3 (mainline linux), or GitHub - ronnyf/AIC8800-Linux-Driver · GitHub
  • remoteproc, has been sent to sunxi mainlining, need to submit another rev to sunxi mainlining.
  • Camera: Still work in progress, have a list I’m working on. Have a todo list, to flush out drivers etc.
  • NPU. (This should work, I have not tested it)
    The goal is to push a lot of this to mainline Linux and then all the distro will have it.
    A lot of rework has been done over the past few days to help get the above working.
    Your question: Will I have a disk image? No. Right now, you can follow the instructions using Ubuntu Linux x86 distro and compile.
    I’m also working on A7A, using updated re-written/ported drivers that are ready to submit.

Yes, you can compile the repo, there is instructions. This is a buildroot out of tree.