Arch Linux

LucasJ

Member

Registered: 2018-09-08

Posts: 2

Wifi card is hard blocked during boot

Hi,

I have a topstar U931 laptop which worked great with Arch for almost 2 years. However, wifi is no longer working. I do not know what triggered the problem (update, wrong key press maybe).

More precisely, the problem is that the wifi card is hard blocked. If I use ip link set wlp1s0 up, I get 'Operation not possible due to RF-kill'.

I read lots of topics of Linux users with a similar problem, there seem to be two main reasons for RFKILL hard block:
- There is a physical switch on the computer to block wifi. I have indeed a wifi keyboard button on my laptop but when I press it, it only toggle soft block.
- More than one driver is loaded for the wifi card, resulting in a conflict. The command lspci shows that my Intel wifi card uses iwlwifi driver. With the command lsmod, the relevant modules are iwlwifi, mac80211 and cfg80211, I do not think that there is a conflict there.

Following the post here (guy with the same laptop and hard block problem), I reseted my wifi card by removing it and putting it back. After that, the wifi led on my laptop is on during first seconds of boots, but the led goes off when Arch boot which makes me think that the hard blocked is caused by the operating system.
I even changed the wifi card from Intel Wireless AC 3160 to Intel Wireless 7260 and nothing changed.

I ran out of ideas to solve the problem, feel free to help!

Here are relevant logs:

$ lspci -k
01:00.0	Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev bb)
	Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260
	Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi

$ lsmod | grep wifi
iwlwifi               335872  1 iwlmvm
cfg80211              782336  3 iwlmvm,iwlwifi,mac80211

$ journalctl -xe
...
Sep 08 15:10:29 anacreon kernel: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux
Sep 08 15:10:29 anacreon kernel: Copyright(c) 2003- 2015 Intel Corporation
Sep 08 15:10:29 anacreon kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
Sep 08 15:10:29 anacreon kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: loaded firmware version 17.948900127.0 op_mode iwlmvm
...
Sep 08 15:10:30 anacreon kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Detected Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless AC 7260, REV=0x144
Sep 08 15:10:30 anacreon kernel: uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB 2.0 Camera  (058f:3822)
Sep 08 15:10:30 anacreon kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: reporting RF_KILL (radio disabled)
Sep 08 15:10:30 anacreon kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: RF_KILL bit toggled to disable radio.
Sep 08 15:10:30 anacreon kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: base HW address: 10:4a:7d:10:01:da
...
Sep 08 15:10:30 anacreon kernel: iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0 wlp1s0: renamed from wlan0

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,532

Website

Re: Wifi card is hard blocked during boot

Did you try unblocking with rfkill?  There is even an unblock service to ensure it is unblocked at every boot (assuming rfkill unblock succeeds).

Last edited by Trilby (2018-09-08 14:33:24)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

LucasJ

Member

Registered: 2018-09-08

Posts: 2

Re: Wifi card is hard blocked during boot

Yes I did, rfkill unblock only works for soft block (this is the normal behavior I think).