Bug 14098
| Summary: | dell_laptop rfkill incorrectly reports state '2' (Vostro 1320) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | Other | Reporter: | Sam Morris (sam) |
| Component: | Modules | Assignee: | other_modules |
| Status: | RESOLVED OBSOLETE | ||
| Severity: | normal | CC: | alan, benjury, blessedbyvirtuosity, debfx-kernel, felash, kernel-bugzilla, raphoun, squan |
| Priority: | P1 | ||
| Hardware: | All | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Kernel Version: | 2.6.30.4 | Subsystem: | |
| Regression: | No | Bisected commit-id: | |
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Description
Sam Morris
2009-08-31 12:15:57 UTC
An update of the BIOS to A03 solves the issue. Is it possible to upgrade the BIOS without Windows? I had a go with the libsmbios tools but couldn't get them to recognise the new firmware image. I spent (too) much time trying to update it without installing Windows. Afaik the Vostro series doesn't support updating the BIOS though libsmbios. However they provide a DOS executable, which I tried to run on freedos but didn't work because it hung while analyzing the system. So in the end I backed up my Linux partition, installed Windows to update the BIOS and restored the Linux partition. Ugh. Unfortunately I don't want to spend £70 for a Windows license just to update the BIOs... :( Initally I thought the bios update fixed the issue for me, but whenever I boot my laptop while the hardware killswitch (phy0) is set to blocked, wireless lan is disabled. The only way to fix this is to un-block the hardware killswitch and reload the kernel module. After that everything works fine. So if the killswitch phy0 is set to hard blocked while the kernel module dell_laptop is loaded, the killswitch dell-wifi is permanently set to hard and soft blocked and thus disabling wireless network in NetworkManager. This bug occurs with a dell XPS M1530 too. Is there a workaround to fix it? Add "blacklist dell_laptop" to your modprobe config (e.g. on Ubuntu /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf). I confirm that either blacklisting dell_laptop (what brings this module anyway ?) or updating the BIOS (got it without Windows) to the last version (and enabling back dell_laptop) made network-manager work again. Just ran into this with an update to Ubuntu Karmic. Also a Dell XPS m1530. I am already running BIOS A12 which according to Dell is the highest available for the m1530. Felix's instructions (comment #7) to blacklist dell_laptop worked for me. Had the same problem with my Dell XPS M1330. Blacklisting dell_laptop also worked. I am getting this on my M1530 also, but I wonder if it isn't a slightly different issue. It seems to detect the switch reliably, it's just that the values are reversed. When I switch it off, rfkill list shows it as unblocked, and when I switch it back on, it shows it as blocked. So I wonder if this isn't actually a simple problem with this particular model in the dell_laptop driver? Same problem with dell latitude X300 with "PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter" running 2.6.34 (openSUSE-11.3, module drivers/platform/x86/dell-laptop.ko not loaded (don't know why).
After boot rfkill (from package 'rfkill') command reports
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: yes
and after activating the adapter with FN F2
it reverses:
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: yes
Hard blocked: no
and that's wrong.
After doing
rfkill 0 unblock
radio state confusion is fixed and interface is able to associate and connect.
rfkill (and connection) state also persist on suspend/resume (to RAM) cycles.
It looks like rfkill gets its information from
/dev/rfkill and
/sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/name
In contrast states in
/sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2100/0000\:02\:04.0/rf_kill
seem always be ok.
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