[Buildroot] guidelines to select a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module

[Andreas Ziegler]

Hi David,

Some things that I found useful in the past:

On 2025-03-31 15:38, David Picard wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I need to add Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity to my system. But it's
> really hard to understand which driver supports which product.
> 
> Could you please me some piece of advice to guide my search for a 
> module ?

Linux wireless [1] has a documentation of implemented drivers with 
reference to supported manufacturers and chipsets. Unfortunately no 
reverse lookup, so a bit time-consuming to read ...

If you can obtain a block diagram of the board /the SoC, this might help 
to identify hardware connected via non-standard interfaces (SDIO, GPIO). 
In addition to the wireless module, you will need kernel drivers for the 
subsystem.

There is the brute force approach: if your hardware is supported by a 
major distribution, boot an installation image and record the output of 
dmesg, lsmod, lspci, lsusb. This might give you additional insight, 
which hardware is present on the system.

The target package wpa_supplicant is necessary for unattended wireless 
network access.

Kind regards,
Andreas

> David

[1] https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers.html