The WiFi dongle I got with mine has worked fine since I got the board. It has been connected continuously to my AP for nearly 10 months at this stage. The only time it has been disconnected from WiFi is when I upgraded the OS.
user@starfive:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 3452:6600 ESWIN 6600U
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 2109:3431 VIA Labs, Inc. Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
user@starfive:~$ uname -a
Linux starfive 5.15.0-starfive #1 SMP Wed Aug 23 11:18:20 CST 2023 riscv64 GNU/Linux
It does generate the odd message on the serial console, but that is not an issue for me.
I’m running “VisionFive 2 Debian Image 202308” and I double checked and the SPL/U-Boot binaries I installed (before I installed the newer OS) was v3.6.1 (which would have been the version that was recommended for the 202308 image).
The ESWIN 6600U chipset firmware currently used on the VF2 board is from sometime before 2022-10-31.
user@starfive:~$ md5sum /lib/firmware/ECR6600U_transport.bin
02f67eb1fcb6a549d49f29e277feec36 /lib/firmware/ECR6600U_transport.bin
user@starfive:~$
This is most definitely not the latest firmware, but it looks like the API may change enough between firmware revisions that you can not just change the firmware version without modifying the driver source code to match. And if you think about it, that has very little to do with the VF2 board and the JH7110 SoC, so StarFive would probably not invest resources into that area unless there is a major problem. My guess would be that a later firmware revision and matching driver patches could yield higher performance.
But at the end of the day the device is only a USB 2,0 High Speed device (which is half-duplex). So, allowing for ACK packets, the theoretical maximum throughput is going to be a lot less than the 40MB per second (320Mbit/sec) of data streaming from a hard disk or SDR in one direction only. I’ve done no testing whatsoever but my gut feeling would be that it would probably end up being a lot closer to 20MB per second (160Mbit/sec).