Re: [gentoo-user] Unable to set wireless regulatory domain

[Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com>]

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On Monday 09 May 2011 17:20:49 John Nielsen wrote:
> On May 6, 2011, at 4:14 PM, Mick wrote:
> > On Friday 06 May 2011 18:04:31 John Nielsen wrote:
> >> Doesn't look like this went through the first time; re-sending without
> >> attachment.
> >> 
> >> On May 5, 2011, at 6:52 PM, Paul Hartman wrote:
> >>> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 12:40 PM, John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net> 
wrote:
> >>>> I am trying to set up a 5GHz wireless access point on an Alix 3d2
> >>>> board with an AR9220 (ath9k "Merlin") PCI card. I have done so
> >>>> successfully using Fedora 14 on identical hardware but I would
> >>>> greatly prefer to use Gentoo so I can use a more recent kernel and
> >>>> customize things appropriately for the platform.
> >>> 
> >>> It seems like everything is pretty much the same, other than the
> >>> kernel (and presumably the ath9k driver). But I would look at the udev
> >>> rules for CRDA to be sure they match and are being applied the same on
> >>> both systems. You shouldn't ever need to "iw reg set" on a system with
> >>> CRDA, it should do it for you. So I wonder if you're setting it, and
> >>> then CRDA is immediately setting it back to 00...
> >> 
> >> The udev rule for CRDA is the same on both systems, and matches what is
> >> shown on http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/Regulatory/CRDA. The
> >> Fedora box also has a magic rule to call /sbin/setregdomain when an
> >> 80211 interface is added, which is a shell script that infers the
> >> regdomain from the currently set timezone. The punch line of the script
> >> is simply a call to "iw reg set $COUNTRY"
> >> 
> >> However, I'm not sure crda is being called appropriately on the Gentoo
> >> box.
> > 
> > On the Fedora machine I see this in dmesg:
> >>>> [   17.248674] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: US
> >>>> [   18.848206] cfg80211: Regulatory domain changed to country: US
> >> 
> >> and I don't ever see anything similar on the Gentoo machine, even when
> >> running "iw reg set" by hand. Further, I don't see anything in the
> >> output of "udevadm monitor --environment kernel".
> >> 
> >> I just dropped the kernel from the Fedora machine on to the Gentoo box
> >> and (somewhat surprisingly) it works just fine. The reg domain gets set
> >> no problem, hostapd starts, life is good--except that now I feel like
> >> I've sinned against nature and I'd like to get my own, smaller kernel
> >> back.
> >> 
> >> While it's possible the new kernel version is broken I rather suspect
> >> that I have configured it badly. I set out to configure a minimal
> >> kernel with just the features and drivers I want on this hardware and
> >> no need for modules or an initramfs. Does cfg80211 need to be a module
> >> to work properly? I wouldn't think so.
> >> 
> >> I'll do some more experimenting but in the mean time here's my kernel
> >> config in case anyone has ideas on what could be wrong. Thanks!
> >> 
> >> Config file here: http://pastebin.com/S68ye6Pz
> > 
> > I suggest that you run a diff --suppress-common-lines -y between the
> > Fedora and your own kernel to find out what's different between the two
> > as far as your driver is concerned.
> 
> The outright diff was far too verbose to be useful, but looking at "lsmod"
> output when running the Fedora kernel was instructive. I recognized
> everything as being in by Gentoo kernel except for "rfkill", which was
> listed as a dependency of cfg80211. Long story short, I got it working
> like I want by:
> 
> 1) Including RFKILL in my kernel config and
> 2) Building cfg80211, mac80211, rfkill, and all parts of the ath9k driver
> as modules
> 
> Just adding RFKILL to a static (module-less) kernel didn't fix it, and just
> building cfg80211 and friends as modules without RFKILL also didn't fix
> it; I had to do both.
> 
> Thanks all for your responses so far. I'll be happy to ditch Fedora. :)
> 
> For future reference, does anyone know why either of the above would be
> required? If I see the same behavior in the latest git kernel should I
> file a bug? If so, where (since I doubt this is a Gentoo issue)?

I wouldn't have thought that you *must* have rfkill built in as a module for 
it to work.

However, I have my wireless drivers (inc. rfkill) built in as modules.  I did 
this because I need to pass some options to the wireless driver at some point.

The only time I had to build something as a module was alsa, because otherwise 
I couldn't configure my sound card on a particular box (alsaconf/alsactl 
expected it to be a module so that it can probe it).  I ended up compiling it 
as a module since.

Perhaps someone else can advise on this rfkill issue.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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