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#1 2016-05-01 15:57:17

Amphitryon
Member
Registered: 2013-09-20
Posts: 39

Compaq CQ62, WiFi and Network Manager

I have recently acquired a Compaq Presario CQ62 laptop and the wireless networking does not reliably start when booting Arch Linux, i.e. in GNOME the WiFi settings do not reliably appear and in the case the settings do not appear it does not connect.  Sometimes the WiFi is available and sometimes it is not.

lspci -nnk reports the wireless chip as:

02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8191SEvA Wireless LAN Controller [10ec:8171] (rev 10)
    Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device [103c:1467]
    Kernel driver in use: rtl8192se
    Kernel modules: rtl8192se

I have discovered that in cases where the wireless is not available when first logging into GNOME, if I re-start network manager it then becomes available.  I am beginning to suspect, therefore, that the randomness as to whether it is available automatically or not is due to slight differences in the boot order from one time to the next and if I can force the start of network manager to wait a bit the problem would be resolved.  The question is what to wait for?

Looking at the log with journalctl -b it appears that the rtl8192 is recognised fine, the kernel driver is loaded, the firmware is loaded and the interface is renamed.  All this seems to be going on with network manager starting in parallel.

I note that the systemd unit for network manager has After=network-pre.target but I am not sure how to use this to force the order.

Any tips, please?

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#2 2016-05-01 22:44:35

Amphitryon
Member
Registered: 2013-09-20
Posts: 39

Re: Compaq CQ62, WiFi and Network Manager

To answer my own question I think I have now solved it.  It seems to work if NetworkManager startup is delayed until after the RTL WiFi chip's firmware has been loaded.  After getting the idea to make the NetworkManager systemd unit wait for a device and a bit of searching I found that systemd has a device unit for the WiFi adaptor and put that as an After= so in my case I edited:

/etc/systemd/system/dbus-org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.service

so the [Unit] section contains:

After=network-pre.target dbus.service sys-devices-pci0000:00-0000:00:1c.0-0000:02:00.0-net-wlo1.device

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#3 2016-05-04 10:36:33

jeremy31
Member
Registered: 2015-11-01
Posts: 149

Re: Compaq CQ62, WiFi and Network Manager

Sounds like a bug that was recently fixed in network manager upstream. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=764803

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