[Question] Install drivers for USB wi-fi card in VM and passthrough it to host

[marc1 (Adrian Matecki)]

Hello.

I’m there to ask if it is possible to reuse my wi-fi usb dongle.
I own 802.11n wi-fi USB dongle and I don’t want to install proprietary drivers. So I though that before installing these drivers I will ask if my idea is possible.

My plan:

• install light weight distro (for example alpine) in VM (QEMU)
• install drivers for USB dongle in VM GitHub - gnab/rtl8812au: Realtek 802.11n WLAN Adapter Linux driver
• passthrough internet to fedora host (hard part)

And I wonder whether it is feasible especially last step and whether it has any point to do, for example high performance penalty. Or other distro of choosing for example LTS so it won’t break (alpine has 2 year LTS).
Or whether these drivers are better: GitHub - kelebek333/rtl8188fu: RTL8188FU driver for Linux 4.15.x ~ 6.8.x for debian based distros.

[vgaetera (Vladislav Grigoryev)]

@marc1

proprietary drivers

This looks like third-party, not proprietary.

@marc1

whether it is feasible especially last step

It should work, I have some experience with a similar setup.

@marc1

performance penalty

High performance is possible with Virtio.

@marc1

whether it has any point to do

The benefits are indeed questionable.

[marc1 (Adrian Matecki)]

From what I read it seems to be probably the only solution for not LTS kernels, because it doesn’t work on newer kernels.

But I will probably resign from this idea.