On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 12:34 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.
>
Thanks I will look for the maintainer. It seems like a few years ago
there was a Matthew Garrett dealing with some of the *-wmi modules.
Where would I go to find the present maintainer?
>> 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?
>
I think it is UEFI but I'm not sure exactly what that means.
>> 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
>
Thank you for these suggestions. It would make sense that these are
hardware issues.
-Darwin
>> Thanks
>> - Darwin
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Johannes Berg
>> <johannes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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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