http://askubuntu.com/questions/478018/ralink-rt3090-in-ubuntu-14-04-very-bad-reception-keeps-disconnecting " I've upgraded from 12.04 (actually Mint 13) to 14.04 (actually Mint 17) (64bit), and my Wifi reception with my Ralink RT3090 is now very bad. I only get good connectivity if I'm in the same room as my wifi router, whereas previously or in Windows 7 I could connect to the router from a significantly larger distance. Also, the nm-applet now shows only 2 networks tops (the strongest ones), whereas previously I'd get a very long list. Since the wifi still works well in Windows 7, this shouldn't be a hardware issue. " Attached is my `dmesg` output grep'ped with `grep -e ' cfg' -e ' rt'` (those lines seem relevant). Please let me know if any additional information is needed.
Did you report this to the Ubuntu bug tracker?
No. Should I? Is here a wrong place to report that bug? I just started that post on askubuntu.com and from the only reply I got there I inferred that it might(?) belong here. I'd just like it fixed, but I don't have the technical skills or the time to look into it myself so I figured making a little noise about it might be the best thing I could do.
Understandable. But normally when a bug is reported against a distribution kernel, we want the distribution to check things out before we spend a lot of effort working on it upstream. Not only is the kernel you described several months old, but it might have Ubuntu-specific patches that could be contributing to the problem.
The bug persists with "Linux 3.16.0-031600rc3-generic #201406291835 SMP Sun Jun 29 22:36:41 UTC 2014" installed from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.16-rc3-utopic/ as per the instructions on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds#Installing_upstream_kernels . (I reported it to Ubuntu on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1338035 and they gave me those links) So it appears it's not Ubuntu specific and it still exists in what should be the newest kernel.
Created attachment 142171 [details] dmesg_tail_on_3.16.0-031600rc3-generic.txt
Is this still a problem on updated kernels?