On May 6, 2011, at 4:14 PM, Mick wrote: > On Friday 06 May 2011 18:04:31 John Nielsen wrote: >> Doesn't look like this went through the first time; re-sending without >> attachment. >> >> On May 5, 2011, at 6:52 PM, Paul Hartman wrote: >>> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 12:40 PM, John Nielsen <li...@jnielsen.net> wrote: >>>> I am trying to set up a 5GHz wireless access point on an Alix 3d2 board >>>> with an AR9220 (ath9k "Merlin") PCI card. I have done so successfully >>>> using Fedora 14 on identical hardware but I would greatly prefer to use >>>> Gentoo so I can use a more recent kernel and customize things >>>> appropriately for the platform. >>> >>> It seems like everything is pretty much the same, other than the >>> kernel (and presumably the ath9k driver). But I would look at the udev >>> rules for CRDA to be sure they match and are being applied the same on >>> both systems. You shouldn't ever need to "iw reg set" on a system with >>> CRDA, it should do it for you. So I wonder if you're setting it, and >>> then CRDA is immediately setting it back to 00... >> >> The udev rule for CRDA is the same on both systems, and matches what is >> shown on http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/Regulatory/CRDA. The >> Fedora box also has a magic rule to call /sbin/setregdomain when an 80211 >> interface is added, which is a shell script that infers the regdomain from >> the currently set timezone. The punch line of the script is simply a call >> to "iw reg set $COUNTRY" >> >> However, I'm not sure crda is being called appropriately on the Gentoo box. > On the Fedora machine I see this in dmesg: >>>> [ 17.248674] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: US >>>> [ 18.848206] cfg80211: Regulatory domain changed to country: US >> >> and I don't ever see anything similar on the Gentoo machine, even when >> running "iw reg set" by hand. Further, I don't see anything in the output >> of "udevadm monitor --environment kernel". >> >> I just dropped the kernel from the Fedora machine on to the Gentoo box and >> (somewhat surprisingly) it works just fine. The reg domain gets set no >> problem, hostapd starts, life is good--except that now I feel like I've >> sinned against nature and I'd like to get my own, smaller kernel back. >> >> While it's possible the new kernel version is broken I rather suspect that >> I have configured it badly. I set out to configure a minimal kernel with >> just the features and drivers I want on this hardware and no need for >> modules or an initramfs. Does cfg80211 need to be a module to work >> properly? I wouldn't think so. >> >> I'll do some more experimenting but in the mean time here's my kernel >> config in case anyone has ideas on what could be wrong. Thanks! >> >> Config file here: http://pastebin.com/S68ye6Pz > > I suggest that you run a diff --suppress-common-lines -y between the Fedora > and your own kernel to find out what's different between the two as far as > your driver is concerned.
The outright diff was far too verbose to be useful, but looking at "lsmod" output when running the Fedora kernel was instructive. I recognized everything as being in by Gentoo kernel except for "rfkill", which was listed as a dependency of cfg80211. Long story short, I got it working like I want by: 1) Including RFKILL in my kernel config and 2) Building cfg80211, mac80211, rfkill, and all parts of the ath9k driver as modules Just adding RFKILL to a static (module-less) kernel didn't fix it, and just building cfg80211 and friends as modules without RFKILL also didn't fix it; I had to do both. Thanks all for your responses so far. I'll be happy to ditch Fedora. :) For future reference, does anyone know why either of the above would be required? If I see the same behavior in the latest git kernel should I file a bug? If so, where (since I doubt this is a Gentoo issue)? JN
