[STAGING] rt2860sta drops out when running on battery power, worked in Lucid

Installed the Windows driver with ndiswrapper, and it works without issues on battery. Even with my 802.11n access point.

Hi TH

It would be great if you could run a few tests so that we can support your hardware out of the box in natty.

from your lspci.txt:
>Kernel driver in use: rt2860
>Kernel modules: rt2860sta, rt2800pci

Your RaLink RT2860 [1814:0781] should run with rt2800pci in maverick. However it seems that it uses rt2860 (from staging) instead. Could you try whether it works with rt2800pci (by blacklisting rt2860sta or even temporarily renaming the rt2860sta module).

Thanks

Hi Wolfgang,

It doesn't work with rt2800pci:

th@eee:~/src/radio/fl$ sudo rmmod ndiswrapper
th@eee:~/src/radio/fl$ sudo modprobe rt2800pci
th@eee:~/src/radio/fl$ dmesg
....
[295358.839789] ndiswrapper: device wlan0 removed
[295358.844588] ndiswrapper 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A disabled
[295358.846641] usbcore: deregistering interface driver ndiswrapper
[295358.847684] ndiswrapper (ntoskernel_exit:2621): Windows driver didn't free all MDLs; freeing them now
[295363.171855] rt2800pci 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19
[295363.171876] rt2800pci 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[295363.519282] phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel'
[295363.521648] Registered led device: rt2800pci-phy0::radio
[295363.522251] Registered led device: rt2800pci-phy0::assoc
[295363.522569] Registered led device: rt2800pci-phy0::quality

th@eee:~/src/radio/fl$ sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
SIOCSIFFLAGS: Operation not possible due to RF-kill

This is in spite of WLAN being turned on. If the WLAN switch is off wlan0 disappears completely. With rt2860sta or ndiswrapper, this works.

Let me know if you want me to do anything else although it may be a day or two before I can do it.

Thomas

Hi Thomas,

this rfkill problem is new to me so I googled around a bit and it seems there are problems of varying severity somewhere between rfkill and platform drivers like eeepc_laptop and some WLAN drivers.

Could you try the workaround from https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=102428 :
sudo apt-get install rfkill
sudo rfkill list
sudo rfkill unblock all
sudo ifconfig wlan0 up
and see how the rt2800pci performs then?

A next step might be to try without the platform drivers like eeepc_laptop and eeepc_wmi to find out if they really have something to do with this.

Thanks,
Wolfgang

Hi Thomas,

those platform drivers look like the prime suspect. I have found a very good explanation by the
Project Maintainer for ACPI4Asus, Corentin Chary from november 28 2010:
http://xf.iksaif.net/blog/index.php?tag/eeepc-laptop
(Your bug report indeed shows that you have acpi_osi=Linux and both platform modules are loaded.)

So that means it would be great if you could test with a current kernel (without acpi_osi and with only eeepc_wmi loaded) whether this resolves your rfkill issue and whether rt2x00 then works.
( http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ )

Thanks,
Wolfgang

If dropping out on battery is also an issue with the rt2800pci try:
sudo touch /etc/pm/power.d/wireless
which is the recommended way (according to man pm-powersave) to disable a powersave script (wireless in this case).

Hi Thomas,

it has been quite a few month. Do you still see this issue?

As far as the wlan driver is concerned your hardware should now definitely work with the rt2800pci driver. I do not know about the status of the platform driver issue.

Please install the most up to date version of firmware for the rt2800pci driver from:
http://people.canonical.com/~sforshee/lp762987/linux-firmware_1.52~lp762987v201106061858_all.deb
as long as the task of updating the linux-firmware in your ubuntu version to this new firmware is not "fix released" (see bug 762987).

For natty I recommend to use the kernel still in natty-proposed.
For maverick and lucid I recommend to use the newest available linux-backports-modules-compat-wireless.

You may have to blacklist the rt2860sta staging driver if it interferes with the operation of the rt2800pci. Let me know if you have to do this.

Let me know whether or not everything works for you with those new rt2800pci drivers and firmware.

[Expired for linux (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]