Re: Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN rfkill always Soft blocked

[Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>]

On Mon, 2013-04-15 at 11:50 -0400, schwaahed wrote:
> So I configured a kernel with hp-wmi enabled. It had the unfortunate
> consequence of disabling wireless on the windows side. I also saw that
> some people with different hardware from me were able to resolve their
> problem by blacklisting hp-wmi.

Ok, so that means that perhaps the airplane mode interface changed on
your machine from earlier models in the Elitebook series.  You'll need
to talk to the hp-wmi maintainers about how to handle your device then,
at this point it's not a wifi issue, it's the BIOS telling the wifi
hardware to enable/disable itself and that's causing your issues when
trying to unblock stuff.

> rfkill show an additional wifi interface ('hp-wifi' I think), that
> behaves exactly as phy0 did. I still am unable to unblock this
> interface. phy0 doesn't respond to any rfkill commands or the physical
> wifi switch. It is just remains soft and hard blocked.

Yeah, kernel driver issue for hp-wmi, of if HP isn't using WMI anymore
then a different module.  One question though, any idea if your laptop
uses UEFI instead of traditional BIOS?

> Dan -- Are there any links/search terms to older conversations on this issue?

Not your specific issue that I know of, but the rfkill + BIOS
interaction issue has been going on for years; every time the OEMs
change the way BIOS talks to the OS and the wifi card, we need a kernel
update of the various laptop drivers like acer-wmi, hp-wmi,
thinkpad-acpi, etc to handle it.

> Is wifi working on your 2530p?

Yeah, but it's probably not relevant for your machine, since the 2530p
is from 2009.  HP has likely changed the BIOS <-> OS interface since
then.

Dan

> Thanks
> - Darwin
> 
> On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Johannes Berg
> <johannes@sipsolutions.net> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2013-04-15 at 09:39 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> >
> >> > Yeah it seems not loaded, but how then does the soft block affect hard
> >> > block? All very odd, but almost certainly a platform rather than a wifi
> >> > issue.
> >>
> >> On my 2530p and a lot of other laptops, blocking the BIOS
> >> "switch" (either physically or softblock) hardblocks phy0.  I guess the
> >> BIOS twiddles a GPIO that's connected to the mPCI-E module's rfkill
> >> line/GPIO?
> >
> > Yes, that seems to be the case. Something does, anyway, as the GPIO
> > state is pretty much directly reflected in the hard kill of the "phy0"
> > device.
> >
> >> Which leads to the problem we've talked about a long time ago; you can't
> >> treat phy0 hardblock as a physical block that cannot be soft-unblocked,
> >> because some other switch might actually control it's state.  We tried
> >> to gray-out the "Enable Wireless" when hardblocked (since logically you
> >> can't soft-unblock something that's hardblocked), but it turns out you
> >> can't do that because unblocking BIOS switches might un-hardblock the
> >> phy0 wifi switch...  (and the kernel doesn't describe these
> >> dependencies, because, well, that's laptop-specific and would never be
> >> up-to-date).
> >
> > Yeah ... best thing you could do is assume that if a bios rfkill exists
> > it controls the phy0 hard kill and in case it doesn't enable when you
> > unblock the bios device you pop up a message saying to switch the
> > physical button?
> >
> > johannes
> >
> --
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