I have single board computers running Armbian, and so far I’ve just been communicating with them over UART, but obviously I need network connectivity for them. Are there any USB Wi-Fi adapters that are natively supported by the Linux kernel without needing to download something first? I really prefer to just plug a USB dongle in and just have the board boot up with Wi-Fi, especially since my router is in an extremely hard to access place and needing a wired network before Wi-Fi will work is going to get real old real fast since I plan on tinkering with and re-flashing some of them frequently. Can anyone recommend anything?
https://h-node.net is usefull for this, for WIFI you can look here: https://h-node.org/wifi/catalogue/en/1/1/undef/undef/yes/USB/wifi-works/undef to get a list of reports on USB-WIFI adapters.
WIFI modules with the AR9271 chipset are known to be working native. I know Olimex sells such USB-WIFI adapters.