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#1 2008-10-22 19:47:57

avoulk
Member
From: Greece
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 132
Website

Ath9k Atheros wireless card problem

Hello everyone!
A friend of mine just bought an awesome laptop, and wanted me to help him setup a new Archlinux installation.
Everything went smooth, except for the wireless network card.
From the Device Manager of Windows Vista of the laptop, i saw it is an Atheros card, with the AR9820 chipset, which is supposed to work just fine with the latest ath9k driver (or the madwifi one).

The respective lspci -vvv output is:

14:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. Device 002a (rev 01)
    Subsystem: Askey Computer Corp. Device 7136
    Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
    Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
    Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
    Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 19
    Region 0: Memory at f2100000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
    Kernel driver in use: ath9k
    Kernel modules: ath9k

It is bizzare that the module of the card is not recognized (in the first line, it does not indicate anything apart from the Atheros thing, no AR9820 sign)..

The rc.conf of interest part:

MOD_AUTOLOAD="yes"
MODULES=(... ath_hal ath9k ...)
...
wlan0="dhcp"
wlan_wlan0="wlan0 essid BlaBla_essid key BlaBla_key"
INTERFACES=(eth0 wlan0)
...
gateway="default gw 192.168.1.1"
ROUTES=(gateway)

With this setup, he can connect to the router, acquire a valid IP address (192.168.1.2), but he can ping to nowhere.
He keeps getting a host unreachable error.
Any ideas what has gone wrong?
Thnx!

Last edited by avoulk (2008-10-22 19:49:37)

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#2 2008-10-22 23:13:01

byte
Member
From: Düsseldorf (DE)
Registered: 2006-05-01
Posts: 2,046

Re: Ath9k Atheros wireless card problem

Please post the whole network section of rc.conf.
But I would guess that putting a # in front of ROUTES could already solve it.

Last edited by byte (2008-10-22 23:18:58)


1000

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#3 2008-10-23 01:53:20

TjPhysicist
Member
From: Waterloo, Canada
Registered: 2008-04-12
Posts: 126
Website

Re: Ath9k Atheros wireless card problem

Just something that MAY be related...
excerpt from Kernel Changelog for 2.6.27.3:

commit f76f2408cccf448917c8a2a2b775571fd60aee30
Author: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
Date:   Thu Oct 16 19:05:12 2008 +0000

    ath9k/mac80211: disallow fragmentation in ath9k, report to userspace
    
    commit 4233df6b748193d45f79fb7448991a473061a65d upstream
    
    [b]As I've reported, ath9k currently fails utterly when fragmentation
    is enabled.[/b] This makes ath9k "support" hardware fragmentation by
    not supporting fragmentation at all to avoid the double-free issue.
    The patch also changes mac80211 to report errors from the driver
    operation to userspace.
    
    That hack in ath9k should be removed once the rate control algorithm
    it has is fixed, and we can at that time consider removing the hw
    fragmentation support entirely since it's not used by any driver.
    
    Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
    Acked-by: Luis R. Rodriguez <lrodriguez@atheros.com>
    Signed-off-by: John W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com>
    Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

Since you're using the same card....thought i'd let you know tongue

Last edited by TjPhysicist (2008-10-23 01:55:03)


-Tj
Now reborn as Tjh_ (to keep it similar to my username in other places)

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#4 2008-10-24 13:18:25

avoulk
Member
From: Greece
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 132
Website

Re: Ath9k Atheros wireless card problem

Thank you all for your answers, i am going to check them tomorrow morning!
I 'll let you know how it goes smile

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#5 2008-10-25 11:15:39

sacamano_m82
Member
Registered: 2007-05-29
Posts: 167

Re: Ath9k Atheros wireless card problem

Use ath9k, remove madwifi.

Last edited by sacamano_m82 (2008-10-25 11:15:51)

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#6 2008-12-17 06:55:08

B-Con
Member
From: USA
Registered: 2007-12-17
Posts: 554
Website

Re: Ath9k Atheros wireless card problem

I just encountered the same problem. Got an Acer Aspire 4530. Can't get ath9k to work properly, though. The device is created and I can associate with an AP and I can even obtain an IP address (my router stats confirm that my laptop has acquired an IP), but I can't actually perform any networking functions beyond that.

Given the post two posts up, with the fragmentation issue, this leads me to wonder if this is actually layer 4 protocol related...? Apparently UDP packets are working (DHCP uses UDP), but TCP and ICMP packets are not.

My card reports an AR928X chipset. I've tried falling back to madwifi, but that doesn't work at all. I'm on my way to try ndiswrapper, which might be fun given that Acer pulled the XP drivers from their website, apparantly... roll

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