Arch Linux

hoeffl

Member

Registered: 2011-09-26

Posts: 10

Problem with wlan sticks module, not able to write to disk any more

Hello everybody,

when I booted my PC today, a strange and some sort of severe problem occurred concerning my wlan stick(s) that I think, I'm not able to solve without your help. I searched for a solution but it didn't seem that somebody else has had a similar problem before.
Here is the description:
I have two wlan sticks (but I do not use both of them nor are they both plugged in at the same time), and both happen to malfunction since today. My "main" stick (used most of the time) is a BigTec Wireless 11N Adapter with a Realtek chipset. My second one (only used to solve problems with the other stick) is a Fritz! WLAN USB Stick (to be used with ndiswrapper).
After bootup, which makes no problems at all, my "main" wlan stick is not able to connect to the network. When I run wicd-curses (I use wicd as network manager), the virtual terminal freezes (when I use urxvt under openbox to run wicd-curses, only the window freezes). After one minute, a message appears that says something about a dbus problem but I am not able to read it because of the screen clears. Then I'm able to use the terminal again, but (and this is the very, very strange about this) when I run any program that tries to write on my disk it stucks, so I can't cancel it with ctrl-c nor can I kill the process. Wicd-curses, ifconfig or iwconfig also crash after entering the command and show the same behavior. At this point, my wlan stick does not show any sign of being plugged in (normally it blinks...).
My second stick makes the computer crash: After a few moments a stacktrace is shown (like when a kernel panic occurs), saying something about "stack being overrun". But I can't find the message in the log files so it is difficult to post it.
When I tried to figure out a solution, I saw in pacman.log, that yesterday udev and hwdetect were updated... But also downgrading all the packages that were updated yesterday did not solve the problem!
I'll post now the last lines of a few logs here (but nothing concerning the ndiswrapper stick, else it would be too disturbing), I hope they help you at helping me!

everything.log

Jan 23 15:25:26 localhost dhcpcd[835]: dhcpcd not running
Jan 23 15:25:27 localhost kernel: [   21.415035] r8712u: Loading firmware from "rtlwifi/rtl8712u.bin"
Jan 23 15:25:27 localhost kernel: [   22.063785] r8712u: 1 RCR=0x153f00e
Jan 23 15:25:27 localhost kernel: [   22.064534] r8712u: 2 RCR=0x553f00e
Jan 23 15:25:27 localhost kernel: [   22.170765] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready
Jan 23 15:25:27 localhost dhcpcd[847]: dhcpcd not running
Jan 23 15:25:28 localhost kernel: [   22.410354] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: irq 41 for MSI/MSI-X
Jan 23 15:25:28 localhost kernel: [   22.463386] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: irq 41 for MSI/MSI-X
Jan 23 15:25:28 localhost kernel: [   22.463902] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
Jan 23 15:25:28 localhost dhcpcd[854]: dhcpcd not running
Jan 23 15:25:28 localhost kernel: [   22.735037] r8712u: Loading firmware from "rtlwifi/rtl8712u.bin"
Jan 23 15:25:29 localhost kernel: [   23.383789] r8712u: 1 RCR=0x153f00e
Jan 23 15:25:29 localhost kernel: [   23.384535] r8712u: 2 RCR=0x553f00e
Jan 23 15:25:29 localhost kernel: [   23.490763] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready
Jan 23 15:26:11 localhost dhcpcd[1382]: dhcpcd not running
Jan 23 15:26:12 localhost kernel: [   66.495307] r8712u: Loading firmware from "rtlwifi/rtl8712u.bin"              # then I hard reset because of the freeze

errors.log

Jan 23 15:00:01 localhost /USR/SBIN/CROND[5597]: (CRON) EXEC FAILED (/usr/sbin/sendmail): No such file or directory
Jan 23 15:20:01 localhost /USR/SBIN/CROND[6215]: (CRON) EXEC FAILED (/usr/sbin/sendmail): No such file or directory
Jan 23 15:25:26 localhost dhcpcd[835]: dhcpcd not running
Jan 23 15:25:27 localhost dhcpcd[847]: dhcpcd not running
Jan 23 15:25:28 localhost dhcpcd[854]: dhcpcd not running
Jan 23 15:26:11 localhost dhcpcd[1382]: dhcpcd not running                   # then I hard reset because of the freeze

daemon.log

Jan 23 15:25:15 localhost [    0.864888] udevd[48]: starting version 175
Jan 23 15:25:15 localhost [    4.116488] udevd[235]: starting version 178
Jan 23 15:25:26 localhost dhcpcd[835]: dhcpcd not running
Jan 23 15:25:27 localhost dhcpcd[847]: dhcpcd not running
Jan 23 15:25:28 localhost dhcpcd[854]: dhcpcd not running
Jan 23 15:26:11 localhost dhcpcd[1382]: dhcpcd not running                     # then I hard reset because of the freeze

I hope you can help me and thank you for trying

hoeffl

P.S.: Excuse all the mistakes I made because of being new here, please!

hoeffl

Member

Registered: 2011-09-26

Posts: 10

Re: Problem with wlan sticks module, not able to write to disk any more

Ok... After a lot of tries (for example, switching to networkmanager didn't help either) I finally had the idea of simply using wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd. That helped me out!
Everything works fine now

EDIT: So it's more or less a workaround and not a solution... Should this topic be marked as 'solved'?

Last edited by hoeffl (2012-01-25 17:04:59)

extcake

Member

Registered: 2008-11-11

Posts: 10

Re: Problem with wlan sticks module, not able to write to disk any more

Hello,
I also have problem with connecting to network with my wifi dongle (using same chip r8712u)
I couldn't make it work with netcfg (but it works flawless when using lastest Core Image with netcfg and wirless-wpa example)
Using wpa_supplicant manualy fixed problem (netcfg didn't work with wireless-wpa-config example using same wpa_supplicant.cfg)

Last edited by extcake (2012-01-29 00:58:41)

wrc1944

Member

From: Gainesville, Florida

Registered: 2007-10-07

Posts: 117

Re: Problem with wlan sticks module, not able to write to disk any more

This seems to be a problem with r8712u on all 3.2.x and 3.3-rc kernels on all distros.  I've had it for weeks on Gentoo, Arch, and several other distros.

If you are running a 3.2.x kernel, this is almost definitely the problem.  All 3.1 kernels don't do this.

I posted a temporary work-around on the Arch bugzilla, and Larry Finger (kernel dev with wireless) is currently working on it (a patch).   

In the meantime, If you compile your own kernels, you can get 3.2.x's to work normally- see my comment here for more details.   https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/27996
Top of page doesn't say r8712u, but it's the same problem, and after the first 2-3 comments it deals with r8712u specifically.

There is also info on the Gentoo forum 3.2 kernel quirks thread, towards the bottom of Page 1:  http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-901702.html

Last edited by wrc1944 (2012-02-03 07:45:32)

stqn

Member

Registered: 2010-03-19

Posts: 1,191

Website

Re: Problem with wlan sticks module, not able to write to disk any more

The r8712u firmware loading bug has been fixed in 3.3.1… But now it crashes instead. (When I press “Connect” in Wicd, or at shutdown with netcfg.) Still stuck with 3.0 lts…

stqn

Member

Registered: 2010-03-19

Posts: 1,191

Website

Re: Problem with wlan sticks module, not able to write to disk any more

The update to Linux 3.3.3 fixed the crashing bug for me! Yay.