Regression in 2.6.30-rc1 since commit acae0515 - wireless broken

Larry Finger
2009-04-08T04:54:41Z

The most recent pulls of the Linux-2.6 git tree has broken wireless. The problem
was bisected with commit acae05156551fd7528fbb616271e672789388e3c, entitled
"module: create a request_module_nowait()", indicated as the faulty change. This
is seen with driver b43 on my system, and 2 reports for driver iwlagn:
http://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=123916157630571&w=2 and
http://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=123913015021457&w=2.

For b43, the logged error messages are:

phy0: Failed to initialize wep: -2
b43: probe of ssb0:0 failed with error -2

With this driver, module ssb is selected from the PCI ID. It then loads b43,
which triggers the loading of rfkill, mac80211, cfg80211, led-class, and
input-polldev. It appears that the nowait method is killing the chain somewhere.
If I unload and reload b43, then all these modules load correctly and wireless
works.

If this commit is reverted, wireless works OK.

I will be happy to try any patches to make request_module_nowait() work with
wireless networking.

Larry