Ubuntu

WIFI support (madwifi for atheros pci) lost in kernel 2.6.17-7-generic

Asked by Justin Chudgar

System:
- Pentium D 805
- ECS RC410L/800Mv2
- Atheros AR5005G 802.11abg NIC
- Marvell 8300 802.11bg NIC

Installed from Dapper CD and upgraded to Edgy. System works with atheros wifi support with kernel <i>linux-image-2.6.17-7-386</i>, the uniprocessor kernel. When I try to boot into the <i>linux-image-2.6.17-7-generic</i> SMP kernel, the system does not load the modules for atheros wifi support, but seems to otherwise work.

I built my own kernel from the 2.6.17.11 sources with SMP support, but otherwise staying close to the <i>386</i> config options. I still lose atheros support with this kernel.

I then tried using a Marvell 8300 wifi nic with the <i>generic</i> kernel and with my SMP kernel; and, this time there was a different problem. With the Marvell 8300, using ndiswrapper and the Asus WinXP drivers, I got <i>Soft lock detected on CPU1</i> in the syslog and the system completely froze.

Using the Marvell card and ndiswrapper on the uniprocessor <i>386</i> kernel and everything is fine.

Please instruct me on how to enable both wifi and SMP with Edgy.

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John Dong
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Revision history for this message
John Dong (jdong) said : 		#1

Are you sure you have linux-generic installed? Atheros support is working fine with the -generic kernel on my Edgy systems.

Revision history for this message
Justin Chudgar (justinzane) said : 		#2

I am quite sure. From /boot/grub/menu.lst:

        title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17.11-ubuntu1-justin # My kernel based
        on -386's config and the linux source package
        ...
        title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-7-386 # the uniprocessor kernel
        that is installed upon first doing a dist-upgrade
        ...
        title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-7-generic # the smp kernel from
        apt-get install linux-generic
        ...

I have attached the syslog from yesterday in case that provides
informative. I have spent over a dozen hours attempting to resolve this
issue via published resources, building and rebuilding madwifi, the
kernel, etc. I would not have bothered you if I was not convinced that
this was a problem.

On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 14:40 +0000, John Dong wrote:

> Support request #1828 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+ticket/1828
>
> Comment:
> Are you sure you have linux-generic installed? Atheros support is working fine with the -generic kernel on my Edgy systems.

Revision history for this message
Alexandre Vassalotti (avassalotti) said : 		#3

Do you have the linux-restricted-modules installed for your custom kernel? Also, I would like to how did you built your kernel, have you used the Linux kernel source with Ubuntu patches, or the source from kernel.org?

Revision history for this message
Justin Chudgar (justinzane) said : 		#4

Actually, the release today of linux-restricted-modules-2.6.17-8-generic
seems to have fixed the problem. I am writing this using both cores and
sending via ath0. Woo hoo!

i had done an apt-get linux-sources to get the kernel sources, make
oldconfig while running 2.6.17-7-386, make gconfig to change from up to
smp, and make-kpkg --append-to-version=-justin --initrd kernel_image
kernel_headers modules_image, and then dpkg -i to install them all. I
had linux-restricted...-386 installed but until today, I was unable to
find linux-restricted...-generic. So, I built the fglrx and madwifi
myself from source.

Anyway, thanks for the reply.

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 02:54 +0000, Alexandre Vassalotti wrote:

> Support request #1828 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+ticket/1828
>
> Comment:
> Do you have the linux-restricted-modules installed for your custom kernel? Also, I would like to how did you built your kernel, have you used the Linux kernel source with Ubuntu patches, or the source from kernel.org?

Revision history for this message
Alexandre Vassalotti (avassalotti) said : 		#5

Great! If you don't have any other question can you close this ticket, please?

Revision history for this message
Justin Chudgar (justinzane) said : 		#6

Thanks for the replies.