Realtek 8852BE wlan adapter not detected

Question

I have a brand new Ideapad 5 (model 15ABA7) with a fresh install of Debian. I am struggling to get wifi to work as it seems linux isn't recognizing the wlan adapter. The only networking device that shows up in lspci is the ethernet adapter.

$ lspci | grep Network
01:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device b852

No wlan adapter is detected by nmcli:

$ nmcli device show
GENERAL.DEVICE:                         lo
GENERAL.TYPE:                           loopback
GENERAL.HWADDR:                         00:00:00:00:00:00
GENERAL.MTU:                            65536
GENERAL.STATE:                          10 (unmanaged)
GENERAL.CONNECTION:                     --
GENERAL.CON-PATH:                       --
IP4.ADDRESS[1]:                         127.0.0.1/8
IP4.GATEWAY:                            --
IP6.ADDRESS[1]:                         ::1/128
IP6.GATEWAY:                            --
IP6.ROUTE[1]:                           dst = ::1/128, nh = ::, mt = 256

Output of lshw:

$ lshw -class network
  *-network UNCLAIMED
       description: Network controller
       product: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
       vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: 00
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: ioport:2000(size=256) memory:fd600000-fd6fffff
  *-network
       description: Ethernet interface
       physical id: 1
       bus info: usb@2:1
       logical name: enx606d3cbc9fcf
       serial: 60:6d:3c:bc:9f:cf
       size: 1Gbit/s
       capacity: 1Gbit/s
       capabilities: ethernet physical mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation
       configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8152 driverversion=v2.16.3 (2022/07/06) duplex=full ip=192.168.0.19 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=1Gbit/s

The wireless adapter is supposedly a RTL8822BE. WiFi worked in windows so I don't think it is a hardware functionality problem.

Things I have tried:

• installed firmware-realtek package
• installed rtw89 driver from lwfinger
• cmos reboot (hold power button down for 60 seconds)
• secure boot is disabled (first thing I did before debian install)

To no avail. Anyone else get wifi working with this chipset?

Answer 1

The driver for this is included in the 6.2 Linux kernel. I had this same issue and after updating the kernel, WiFi works as expected.

Answer 2

I just got mine working. It's not rtw89 but rtl8852be as found here: https://github.com/HRex39/rtl8852be

(seems the chip is a realtek 8852be, though it just says "b852").

I'd already installed the dependencies as listed on https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89 so you may or may not need those first.

Answer 3

Realtek 8852be driver installation on debian 11, linux kernel 6.1 (for other kernels >5.7 assume all will be the same)

• Instruction: https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89 I use instruction with deb package creation.

• debian 11 has firmware only for rtw8852a in /lib/firmware/rtw89 (packakge firmware-realtek)

  In this case dmesg will print errors like:

  firmware: failed to load rtl_bt/rtl8852b_fw.bin (-2)

  To fix it, need to load firmwares from:

  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/rtw89

  And put it to /lib/firmware/rtw89 and reboot the system.

All described in rtw89 Readme.md, but there was a problem for me to undrestand that failed to load rtl_bt/rtl8852b_fw.bin (-2) means firmware missing. And find part where described link to firmware binaries.

kernel >= 6.2 already contains this driver