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Fix your wifi card being blocked after booting (Linux 3.10.x)

December 25th, 2013 No comments

 

The problem

 
After upgrading an old laptop (HP nc8430) to a kernel from the 3.10 series, everything seemed to work fine, except for my wifi card (Atheros AR5418 Wireless Network Adapter [AR5008E 802.11(a)bgn]). Contrary to the previous kernels, after booting, the wifi led was dead, and I obviously had no connection with my wifi station. At first sight, I tried the wifi radio button, but that didn’t help, the wifi led stayed dead. Wicd could not find an active adapter.

 

Analyse this

 
When I ran lsmod , it showed me that all the required modules (the ath9k driver for the wifi adapter, wifi networking, 802.11, …) were loaded. When I ran iwconfig, it even showed me a wlan0 device, albeit not connected of course. WTF is going on ?

 Ok, let’s see what rfkill says:

rfkill list

I got a surprise: everything was blocked. I also have no idea why, but rfkill now showed me two wifi options: hp_wmi and phy0. I am pretty sure the hp_wmi thingie was never there before. Both of them were blocked (hard and soft), so I unblocked them:

rfkill unblock all

Now when I ran wicd-client, it connected to my wifi station. The wifi led come on as well. Good, but now, how do we fix this permanently ?

 

Solution

 
It appears that the hp_wmi module (support for some HP keys) does not play well with the rfkill module (RFKill is a linux kernel subsystem that provides an interface through which radio transmitters in a computer can be queried, activated, and deactivated).
So, a simple fix is to prevent the hp_wmi module from loading. On a Slackware 14.0 system, this can be achieved by creating a hp_wmi.conf file, in /etc/modprobe.d/, containing the following:

##############################################################################
# Do not edit this file; instead, copy it to /etc/modprobe.d/ and edit that
##############################################################################

# Blacklist because interferes with wifi (wifi rf blocked at boot) 
blacklist hp_wmi

 
This solves my problem: the wifi card now works again straight after booting, just like it did before. If you’re facing the same problem, let me know if this fix also works for you.
  

Categories: hardware, hp_wmi, linux, rfkill, wifi Views: 652