Troubleshooting FreeBSD Wireless Problem

My main personal workstation is a Thinkpad x60s. As I wrote in Triple-Boot Thinkpad x60s, I have Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux, and FreeBSD installed. However, I rarely use the FreeBSD side. I haven't run FreeBSD on the desktop for several years, but I like to keep FreeBSD on the laptop in case I encounter a situation on the road where I know how to solve a problem with FreeBSD but not Windows or Linux. (Yes I know about [insert favorite VM product here]. I use them. Sometimes there is no substitute for a bare-metal OS.)

When I first installed FreeBSD on the x60s (named "neely" here), the wireless NIC, an Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, was not supported on FreeBSD 6.2. So, I used a wireless bridge. That's how the situation stayed until I recently read M.C. Widerkrantz's FreeBSD 7.2 on the Lenovo Thinkpad X60s. It looked easy enough to get the wireless NIC running now that it was supported by the wpi driver. I had used freebsd-update to upgrade the 6.2 to 7.0, then 7.0 to 7.1, and finally 7.1 to 7.2. This is where the apparent madness began.

I couldn't find the if_wpi.ko or wpifw.ko kernel modules in /boot/kernel. However, on another system (named "r200a") which I believe had started life as a FreeBSD 7.0 box (but now also ran 7.2), I found both missing kernel modules. Taking a closer look, I simply counted the number of files on my laptop /boot/kernel and compared that list to the number of files on the other FreeBSD 7.2 system.

$ wc -l boot-kernel-neely.06dec09a.txt
     545 boot-kernel-neely.06dec09a.txt
$ wc -l boot-kernel-r200a.06dec09a.txt
    1135 boot-kernel-r200a.06dec09a.txt

Wow, that is a big difference. Apparently, the upgrade process from 6.2 to 7.x did not bring almost 600 files, now present on a system that started life running 7.x.

Since all I really cared about was getting wireless running on the laptop, I copied the missing kernel modules to /boot/kernel on the laptop. I added the following to /boot/loader.conf:

legal.intel_wpi.license_ack=1
if_wpi_load="YES"

After rebooting I was able to see the wpi0 device.

wpi0:  mem 0xedf00000-0xedf00fff irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci3
wpi0: Ethernet address: [my MAC]
wpi0: [ITHREAD]
wpi0: timeout resetting Tx ring 1
wpi0: timeout resetting Tx ring 3
wpi0: timeout resetting Tx ring 4
wpi0: link state changed to UP

I think I will try upgrading the 7.2 system to 8.0 using freebsd-update, then compare the results to a third system that started life as 7.0, then upgraded from 7.2 to 8.0. If the /boot/kernel directories are still different, I might reinstall 8.0 on the laptop from media or the network.

Comments

Joe said…
Ugh. I've been doing upgrades for years. I better stick to fresh installs if the upgrades aren't working properly.
2:22 PM
Shirkdog said…
Fresh install of FBSD 8.0 i386 on T42 IBM Thinkpad, and I had to follow these two links to get the wireless card working.

http://www.freebsddiary.org/wireless-8.php
http://forums.freebsd.org/archive/index.php/t-5530.html
10:04 PM
Anonymous said…
it really is quite a shame that so many of us have moved away from FreeBSD in favor of something else (e.g. Ubuntu). I just retired my last FreeBSD box - was on the net for 11 years. Now it runs karmic.. *sigh*...
10:56 PM
Tokwear said…
never in my life upgrading FreeBSD using auto tool, but rather have a fresh install
12:46 PM
Anonymous said…
Have you had any problems connecting to WLANs with no WPA or WEP ? Mine (also x60s) seems to panic and generally act up whenever I connect to an unprotected network. WPA and WEP works fine though.
5:15 AM
AHA said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
5:33 AM
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