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


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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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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
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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


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.
>
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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
>

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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

[1] http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/
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