How to install and configure Wi-Fi drivers in Photon OS

[Butch0379]

This is to post how to setup drivers properly for Photon OS for Wireless usage

[Butch0379]

Here is an example for installing fimware/drivers for Intel wireless network adapters:

##Install packages needed for Wifi make process
#Reference https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Photon-OS-Discussions/Photon-4R1-how-to-passthrough-usb/td-p/28754...
tdnf distro-sync -y
tdnf install -y dkms build-essential git linux-api-headers linux-devel usbutils pciutils wpa_supplicant linux-firmware
tdnf update -y

##Download and install Intel Firmware/Driver
cd /tmp
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git --depth 1
cd linux-firmware
#sudo wget https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/iwlwifi-7265D-29.uc...
sudo cp iwlwifi-* /lib/firmware/

##Enable Wifi Services
systemctl enable wpa_supplicant@wlan0.service

##reboot
reboot

##Validate drivers are loaded at boot
dmesg | grep iwlwifi

##Check Driver status
lsmod | grep iwlwifi

[DCasota]

Hi @Butch0379 ,

Any advice for module signing for secure boot?

Actually I'm trying to make work the Realtek wifi drivers on Photon OS unfortunately without success.

From https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89 the recipe there is quite comprehensive, however the installation of mokutil fails. Tried some cross linux distros e.g. https://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/linux/updates/36/Everything/x86_64/Packages/m/mokutil-0.6.0-3.fc36.... as well.

[Butch0379]

Hey @DCasota,

Unfortunately I have not had a business reason to use secure boot for PhotonOS yet, so I have not run across this. This would be another great thing to request VMware to make some documentation on for us. They are going to make some documentation for how to install drivers. This would be a good thing for them to add too I would think. Create a feature request for this and tag this posting in it. Feature requests are found here: https://github.com/vmware/photon/issues

Reach out to Mike Roy to talk about adding this to Photon OS documentation too might help.

[DCasota]

Ah, spotted your initiative there for additional docs chapters. Let's see which docs progress is doable. Mike Roy and the team there work hard to maintain the open-source version of Photon OS, too.

btw - progress classification :

Create a feature/issue ticket = 15 minutes++
Often I consider myself here. It's easy to open a feature/issue ticket. Fire'n'Forget  - because the community solves it. Works in a bustling and very rich rich community - users get business-like help for free.

Create a workaround = 15 hours++
After having being trained on how to write package installer scripts, writing an automation recipe minor than a thousand code lines is a nobrainer and solves the urgent issue. Glad when it works - and it encourages others to share their code snippets with the community, too.
But guess what, here's the gap (!) because an automation recipe is not a Github pull request.

Create a pull request = 15 days++
Imho pretested SPECS packages in the future for (shim) drivers, AI model libraries, inferencing tools, etc. is the Achilles' area. Pretesting the content through reproducible test case automation and successful iso build automation often is critical business time.

These are the numbers. Shrink the payload.

[amakhalov]

Hi @DCA, Photon OS shim does not support MOK as there was no such request. We can consider adding it to Photon OS 5.0.

Current solution is to add custom certificate in DER format to VM's UEFI DB:

uefi.secureBoot.dbDefault.file0 = "custom-cert.der"

[DCasota]

@amakhalov woot, woot! heads up, these are awesome news! Will there be a participation possibility for the Photon OS 5.0 beta ? 

After 6.5 with vSphere 7.0 there were some culprits.

Not easy one, cross cloud from ground up over x86_64, arm64, AWS, GCE, Azure, ... Definitely worth to carefully check all combinations, let's do it ... and contribute by writing pull requests. Really wonder with which Linux kernel. Still can't believe it, folks, 5.0 !!

[DCasota]

In ESXi, adding a PCI device to a vm makes e.g. a PCIe Wireless Ethernet Adapter available to the vm operating system.

Here an additional short recipe for how to configure a Realtek wireless network adapter in Photon OS.

1. Install the prerequisites to install additional drivers. With Photon OS 5.0, more drivers will be built-in included.

tdnf install usbutils pciutils wpa_supplicant git make build-essential linux-api-headers linux-devel linux-firmware dkms

#realtek 8852
git clone https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89.git
cd ./rtw89
make
make install
modprobe -v rtw_8852ae
lsmod | grep 8852

# realtek8821
cd ../
git clone https://github.com/tomaspinho/rtl8821ce
cd ./rtl8821ce
./dkms-install.sh
lsmod | grep 8821

2. Enable wpa_supplicant and configure the wifi network scan settings (wlan0)

systemctl enable wpa_supplicant@wlan0.service
wpa_supplicant -B -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf

wpa_cli
> add_network 0
> set_network 0 ssid "MYSSID"
> set_network 0 psk "passphrase"
> enable_network 0
> save_config
> quit

3. Configure the wifi network ip settings e.g. for dhcp

cd /etc/systemd/network/
cp 99-dhcp-en.network 98-dhcp-wl.network
chmod 644 98-dhcp-wl.network
sed "s/Name=e/Name=wlan/" 99-dhcp-en.network > 98-dhcp-wl.network
systemctl restart systemd-networkd

networkctl status wlan0