I cannot get wireless to work on my new Sony VAIO VPCEG laptop. It has the ar9285 chip in it. I am thinking this is a bug in the driver and wondering what I should do about it. Before I file an official bug report (with Fedora?), I want to know if anybody else has a machine with this chip in it that is working. I'd like to rule out my own stupidity first.
I can state the following:
1) There is a hardware wireless switch, and it is on 2) I have tried both 2.6.38 and 2.6.40 kernels. 3) I have tried the latest compat-wireless driver from kernel.org 4) iwconfig can see the wlan0 device, but ifconfig does not. 5) Clicking wireless within NetworkManager: a) Airplane Mode shows as ON b) Wireless shows as unavailable c) Clicking wireless briefly turns it on and Disconnected, but then it goes right back to Off/Unavailable d) Turning off Airplane Mode appears to work, but doesn't change anything in c) above. 6) The wireless works fine in Windows 7
What is *really* frustrating about this is that it briefly worked a couple of times. During the install, it showed a list of available wireless networks and I chose mine, and entered the password. Then once, after several reboots for various reasons, it actually came up and worked, but as soon as I rebooted again, I was back to the same old same old and it has not worked since.
Does this sound like a kernel driver bug or something stupid I did? Would it make sense to file a bugzilla against the kernel? Any chance this would work if I installed F14 instead of F15?
Obviously, without wireless, the laptop is a $600 paperweight.
--Greg
On Sun, 2011-09-04 at 12:26 -0600, Greg Woods wrote:
I cannot get wireless to work on my new Sony VAIO VPCEG laptop. It has the ar9285 chip in it.
After screwing around with this for a day, I finally figured out what is going on. For some reason, it was also loading the acer_wmi module, a driver for a different type of wireless chip, and this was screwing things up. As soon as I did "modprobe -r acer_wmi", then everything worked. I just needed to blacklist this module in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, and now the Atheros chip is working even after a reboot.
--Greg
Have you reported your behaviour in a bug report? I've found it on Fedora 16 as well (different hardware: iwl3945 & hp_wmi) so I'd point to your bug just to put it in context.
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Greg Woods woods@ucar.edu wrote:
On Sun, 2011-09-04 at 12:26 -0600, Greg Woods wrote:
I cannot get wireless to work on my new Sony VAIO VPCEG laptop. It has the ar9285 chip in it.
After screwing around with this for a day, I finally figured out what is going on. For some reason, it was also loading the acer_wmi module, a driver for a different type of wireless chip, and this was screwing things up. As soon as I did "modprobe -r acer_wmi", then everything worked. I just needed to blacklist this module in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, and now the Atheros chip is working even after a reboot.
--Greg
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On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 4:06 PM, Pedro Francisco pedrogfrancisco@gmail.com wrote:
Have you reported your behaviour in a bug report? I've found it on Fedora 16 as well (different hardware: iwl3945 & hp_wmi) so I'd point to your bug just to put it in context.
In both of your cases this looks to be a bug in wmi. I'm not exactly sure what that stands for but it appears that they are supposed to help make all the little fancy buttons on laptops work but in your case cause more problems than they fix. I wonder what logic it uses to know which driver to load? It's odd that in Pedro's case it loaded the acer_wmi even though his is a sony...
On my older HP/Compaq 8510w I'm using hp_wmi without issue.
Richard
I'll try to find out how to debug hp_wmi and then we can start from there.
Note: also happens on Ubuntu 11.10 so hopefully a lot more bug testers will appear :p
On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 10:14 PM, Richard Shaw hobbes1069@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 4:06 PM, Pedro Francisco pedrogfrancisco@gmail.com wrote:
Have you reported your behaviour in a bug report? I've found it on Fedora 16 as well (different hardware: iwl3945 & hp_wmi) so I'd point to your bug just to put it in context.
In both of your cases this looks to be a bug in wmi. I'm not exactly sure what that stands for but it appears that they are supposed to help make all the little fancy buttons on laptops work but in your case cause more problems than they fix. I wonder what logic it uses to know which driver to load? It's odd that in Pedro's case it loaded the acer_wmi even though his is a sony...
On my older HP/Compaq 8510w I'm using hp_wmi without issue.
On Mon, 2011-10-10 at 22:06 +0100, Pedro Francisco wrote:
Have you reported your behaviour in a bug report?
I haven't, and it looks like a good thing that I didn't, because it would appear that I really have no idea what was going on. I thought it was loading a driver for a different wireless chip, but you're saying that the acer_wmi module is supposed to load in addition to the wireless chip driver module, but it has a bug?
--Greg
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Greg Woods woods@ucar.edu wrote: On Sun, 2011-09-04 at 12:26 -0600, Greg Woods wrote: > I cannot get wireless to work on my new Sony VAIO VPCEG laptop. It has > the ar9285 chip in it.
After screwing around with this for a day, I finally figured out what is going on. For some reason, it was also loading the acer_wmi module, a driver for a different type of wireless chip, and this was screwing things up. As soon as I did "modprobe -r acer_wmi", then everything worked. I just needed to blacklist this module in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, and now the Atheros chip is working even after a reboot. --Greg
On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Greg Woods woods@ucar.edu wrote:
On Mon, 2011-10-10 at 22:06 +0100, Pedro Francisco wrote:
Have you reported your behaviour in a bug report?
I haven't, and it looks like a good thing that I didn't, because it would appear that I really have no idea what was going on. I thought it was loading a driver for a different wireless chip, but you're saying that the acer_wmi module is supposed to load in addition to the wireless chip driver module, but it has a bug?
Yes, as best as I can tell[1] it should load in addition to the wireless driver (on an Acer laptop). Apparently these are really ACPI drivers that are used to do the software enable/disable of wireless cards and probably other hardware devices.
Richard
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Greg Woods -
Pedro Francisco -
Richard Shaw