No wifi after upgrading to Squeeze (firmware related?)

[arthurmagill]

Hello Folks,

I recently upgraded from Lenny to Squeeze (apt-get dist-upgrade). Most things went smoothly, but somewhere along the line I lost my wifi. It's a Belkin PCMCIA card (F5D6020v2):

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tosh:/home/magill# lspcmcia -v
Socket 0 Bridge:   	[yenta_cardbus] 	(bus ID: 0000:01:0b.0)
	Configuration:	state: on	ready: yes
			Voltage: 5.0V Vcc: 5.0V Vpp: 0.0V
Socket 0 Device 0:	[atmel_cs]		(bus ID: 0.0)
	Configuration:	state: on
	Product Name:   Belkin 11Mbps-Wireless-Notebook-Network-Adapter 
	Identification:	manf_id: 0x01bf	card_id: 0x3302
			function: 6 (network)
			prod_id(1): "Belkin" (0x3805a391)
			prod_id(2): "11Mbps-Wireless-Notebook-Network-Adapter" (0x04d6f391)
			prod_id(3): --- (---)
			prod_id(4): --- (---)

The card appears present, but refuses to connect

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tosh:/home/magill# iwconfig 
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

eth1      IEEE 802.11-DS  Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.442 GHz  
          Access Point: 00:06:25:C2:D4:29   Bit Rate:11 Mb/s   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

After looking through the logs, I think the problem is related to the firmware. I see lots of these:

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Nov 15 12:15:19 tosh kernel: [46296.363951] atmel_cs 0.0: firmware: requesting atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin
Nov 15 12:15:19 tosh kernel: [46296.422033] atmel_cs 0.0: firmware: requesting atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin
Nov 15 12:15:20 tosh kernel: [46297.446049] atmel_cs 0.0: firmware: requesting atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin
Nov 15 12:33:39 tosh kernel: [47396.362601] atmel_cs 0.0: firmware: requesting atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin
Nov 15 12:33:39 tosh kernel: [47396.440127] atmel_cs 0.0: firmware: requesting atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin
Nov 15 12:33:39 tosh kernel: [47396.822230] atmel_cs 0.0: firmware: requesting atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin

I don't know why the firmware is not being found, it is certainly present:

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tosh:/home/magill# locate atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin
/lib/firmware/atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin

That's about as far as I can get. Does anyone know why the firmware is not being found? I don't know where this might be configured? This looks like it's easy to fix, if you happen to know where to look (I don't). Any suggestions would be very welcome!

Thanks in advance,

Arthur

[arthurmagill]

Replying to myself, the locations to search for firmware appear to be set in the files:

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/lib/udev/firmware.sh

where I find

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FIRMWARE_DIRS="/lib/firmware/updates/$(uname -r) /lib/firmware/updates \
               /lib/firmware/$(uname -r) /lib/firmware"

or in:

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/lib/udev/firmware.agent

where I have

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FIRMWARE_DIRS="/lib/firmware/$(uname -r) /lib/firmware /usr/local/lib/firmware /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware"

So, my firmware ought to be found. I don't see a failure message in the logs, and the directory /dev/.udev/firmware-missing isn't present, so maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here? Just lots and lots of those 'firmware: requesting' lines...

[aspnair]

Are you sure that the firmware file is there? "locate" may take file names from its database.
Try
ls -l /lib/firmware/atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin
Also you should have "atmel-firmware" package installed.
See "dpkg --list | grep atmel-firmware" to see it is installed.

[arthurmagill]

Hi aspnair,
Thanks for the suggestions. Yes, I have atmel-firmware installed, and the file really does exist:

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tosh:/home/magill# ls -l /lib/firmware/atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35272 2008-07-24 21:51 /lib/firmware/atmel_at76c502e-wpa.bin
tosh:/home/magill# dpkg --list | grep atmel-firmware
ii  atmel-firmware                       1.3-4                       Firmware for Atmel at76c50x wireless networking chips.

Do you know how I could check if the firmware is loaded? I'm beginning to suspect that it is correctly loaded, but then re-requested for some reason.

[aspnair]

The firmware request is actually done by the kernel driver module atmel_cs.ko
Since I dont have one of those cards, I can not try that.
I think the firmware load request finally comes to the script as you mentioned.
So trying to debug those scripts may help.