Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 124425
airo "MAC could not be enabled" with an Aironet 340 PCI card
Last modified: 2015-01-04 17:06:26 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040510 Description of problem: I am trying to configure an Aironet 340 PCI wireless card. I'm running kernel-2.6.5-1.358 (default that shipped with FC2). My network adapters are a Realtek 8139 ethernet card and the Aironet 340 wireless card. It appears that the airo module initially loads fine, but then it is unregistered right before the 8139too module loads. airo then reloads after 8139too loads, but it now gives a "MAC could not be enabled" error. I get a "airo device eth1 does not appear to be present" message when I attempt to bring up eth1 manually using the network init script. I will attach the parts of dmesg and lsmod pertaining to networking items. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Load 8139too and airo modules on boot. 2. 3. Additional info:
Created attachment 100587 [details] dmesg and lsmod output
I'm also having these problems with my cisco340 PCI card. I've tried it with new kernel also 2.6.6 but with the same results. With RH9.0 I did also have that problem but as soon I deployed a new kernel 2.4.26 it started to work prefectly no mather what firmware was in Airo340 PCI card. Looks like Fedora isn't quite stable version and behaves like beta.
Funny, because the patch to 2.4.26 contains the comment Summary of changes from v2.4.25 to v2.4.26-pre1 ============================================ snip... o [wireless airo] backport 2.6.x cleanups/minor fixes o [wireless airo] fix build breakage So it looks like whatever was implemented in 2.6 development breaks in 2.6 but works ok in 2.4.26.
So what should be done, bring up Fedora under 2.4.26 ? I think that is not an issue for Fedora developpes... Or should we just wait and see if something brings up...
Fortunately, I'm not in a situation where my only choice for a pipe to the Internet is wireless, so I'm just going to hope that someone takes the bug. But, if you're in an environment where you need this card, I guess your only choice is to downgrade to 2.4.26 for now and hope for the best later. Many educational institutions (such as the University of Virginia where I'm at) have standardized on Cisco wireless, so it would be a shame not to have this functionality available in Fedora.
I just verified the same result using several 4.x versions of the Aironet 340 firmware. (There was a substantial redesign between the 4.x and the 5.x firmware as I recall, and I don't believe the airo module supports 5.x firmware yet.) I think the airo module is just borked.
Unfortunately still broken under kernel-2.6.6-1.435.
There is a workarround, exclude kudzu in startup and everuthing works fine. It seems like kudzu is broken...
Sure enough, that worked. I guess this bug goes to the kudzu guys...
Fedora Core 2 is now maintained by the Fedora Legacy project for security updates only. If this problem is a security issue, please reopen and reassign to the Fedora Legacy product. If it is not a security issue and hasn't been resolved in the current FC3 updates or in the FC4 test release, reopen and change the version to match.
Fixed in FC3.