Atheros Ethernet Card broken after Wifi drivers

[jtaylor991]

Hello all,

So, I installed the "firmware-realtek" package to make my WiFi card work, and my WiFi showed up after a reboot. At the same time, my ethernet port quit working. I still get activity light on my switch, but not the laptop, and Debian says "cable unplugged". Obviously something with the wifi driver made a change to cause this. The ethernet adapter worked right out of the box, so the driver must be already installed. I'm guessing somehow the Realtek drivers disabled the Atheros ethernet one? From running lspci, my ethernet card shows up as "03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR8152 v1.1 Fast Ethernet (rev c1)". I don't know my way around Linux drivers at all, I've just played with the "modprobe" command blindly from other forum threads to make wifi work on various laptops. I'm guessing there's a way to 1) find out what driver that card used, and 2) re-enable it. I just need someone to impart the knowledge (or if that's not it, someone who knows what the problem actually is). Hopefully both drivers can actually run in unison

Thanks for any and all time,
jtaylor991

[dilberts_left_nut]

For a start 'lspci -k' will show what kernel driver is in use for each device.

[jtaylor991]

There we go. Output of that for my network adapters:

Code: Select all

02:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter (rev 01)
	Subsystem: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 8185
	Kernel driver in use: rtl8192ce
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR8152 v1.1 Fast Ethernet (rev c1)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device fd50
	Kernel driver in use: atl1c

Sorry if that was a waste of time, I just didn't know that command. I did "lspci --help" but I don't remember seeing that.

Running "modprobe -r atl1c" and then "modprobe atl1c" fixed it. Thanks a bunch, I just needed a little boost.

[jochen]

I just got the same problem on my Acer Aspire One 521 netbook. Ethernet is a "Atheros Communications Inc. AR8152 v1.1", WiFi is "Broadcom Corporation BCM4313".

After removing module atl1c and reloading it, eth0 was working. But after reboot same problem again.
For the Broadcom BCM4313 the brcmsmac was loaded. I then installed broadcom-sta-dkms, and now the atl1c seems to be loading normally on boot.

Does someone know what is broken here? Is it the atl1c driver, or the brcmsmac?

[divbyzero]

probably io memory conflict
as unloading / reloading the ethernet module fixes this, i would say the wireless module behaves badly and reserves memory for its io that has already been reserved for the ethernet card

that answer your question?

[jochen]

Yes, thank you.