Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 485182
Data cards like Huawei EC121 does not work with RHEL5
Last modified: 2009-09-02 05:03:09 EDT
Description of problem: Modern day datacards like the above have a small flash chip which contain windoze drivers. You need to toggle the device to get the kernel to recognize GSM modem. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): latest RHEL 5.3 with all errata etc How reproducible: Insert device, kernel shows USB CDROM, no GSM model even when using usb_modeswitch Note: Works out of box in F9 and above.
I've been working on a cleaner method to do this in udev-extras. There are a few problems with usb_modeswitch; it's pretty nasty code, and basically gives users carte-blanche (if you can edit the config file) to send whatever strings they like to the USB device. The ideal case (and what I've been doing in udev-extras) is to classify the "CD-ROM Kill" method and use that in the udev rules instead of having a huge config file for every modem like usb_modeswitch. Huawei also posted unusual-devs patches that kill their driver CD a few months ago.
WOuld someone please attach /proc/bus/usb/devices from the problem device? I have no idea what you guys are talking about.
(In reply to comment #2) > WOuld someone please attach /proc/bus/usb/devices from the problem device? > I have no idea what you guys are talking about. First problem is that the device IDs are most likely not present in drivers/usb/serial/option.c. The second issue is the patch that the Huawei people sent to automatically kill their "driver CD" device and bring the modem up in multi-port mode: 1460e5e44cc5ecad7704f63b10dcb3a59d0e008b aad8a278f37e748bfe310a1366f2aa7e0dbaf365 d853d872c14b9adc4adad29e56cd378b291f86e0
Created attachment 338871 [details] patch to make huawei cards work
Attached patch on 2.6.18-128 kernel makes the huawei cards work well.
Can some one look at my patch and let me know if they are ok?
See also https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=496426 for the NM side of the EC121. I would like to harm the Huawei firmware engineers quite painfully.
Yes, i have the available hardware to test it for 5.4 beta.
The patch looks good to me. I'm going to merge the ID tables since the driver does not have separate subdrivers. By the way, this patch should be sufficient to work without usb_switch. Please let me know if this is not the case (if you still need that awful program with the patch applied). See bug 253096 for minimum necessary firmware revisions.
Created attachment 341678 [details] Test patch - re-indented, ID tables merged
Huzaifa, please test the kernel 2.6.18-141.el5.bz485182.1 from here: http://people.redhat.com/zaitcev/ftp/485182/ With quick turnaround we may be able to make the beta.
After testing: After connecting to the usb, i see the connect/disconnect dance as mentioned in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=253096 My solution for this is to do a rmmod usb-storage a couple of times and it works. Since the soln is to upgrade the device firmware and has nothing to do with the kernel, i guess the kernel is fine. I will call this test a pass :)
in kernel-2.6.18-146.el5 You can download this test kernel from http://people.redhat.com/dzickus/el5 Please do NOT transition this bugzilla state to VERIFIED until our QE team has sent specific instructions indicating when to do so. However feel free to provide a comment indicating that this fix has been verified.
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on therefore solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2009-1243.html