Bug 658061

Summary:	Support of Atheros 9170 Wireless chipset by carl9170 driver
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 11.4	Reporter:	Jens Westemeier <Jens_Westemeier>
Component:	Basesystem	Assignee:	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	jeffm
Version:	Milestone 4 of 6
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	SUSE Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Jens Westemeier 2010-12-07 20:03:46 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; de; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 SUSE/3.6.12-0.7.1 Firefox/3.6.12

I tried to use my Atheros 9170 based wlan usb stick in a Vmware virtual machine without sucess. Some of my problems result from running in a virtual machie (disabling me from doing a "real" reset of the device), but some are distribution related.
The kernel provides 2 drivers for this chipset: ar9170usb and carl9170. carl9170 is the newer one and provides full speed.
Connecting the device gets both drivers to be loaded and not interacting properly (lsmod shows both drivers loaded, /var/log/messages shows wiered errors).
-> ar9170usb should be blacklisted by default.
The packages (even the kernel-firmware) don't provide the required (opensource) FW.
-> Install /lib/firmware/carl9170-1.fw by the appropriate rpm. Latest version can be found at "http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/chr/carl9170/fw/"

Greetings, Jens.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Connect a Atheros 9170 based wireless stick to the system
Actual Results:  
lsmod shows ar9170usb and carl9170 loaded.
No carl9170-1.fw found in /lib/firmware.

Expected Results:  
Get carl9170 as the default driver for this device, blacklist ar9170usb.

Comment 1 Jeff Mahoney 2011-02-07 18:20:55 UTC

Greg, can you add the firmware to the kernel-firmware package? Once that's done, I'll disable the ar9170 driver.

Comment 2 Greg Kroah-Hartman 2011-02-10 18:42:55 UTC

The firmware needs to go to the upstream linux-firmware package, why hasn't
it been accepted there?

As I can't seem to find a distribution license for the firmware, or an author
information, we can't accept this into our tree, sorry.

Can you ask the upstream developer to please submit it to the linux-firmware
package?  Or do you need me to do that for you?

Comment 3 Jens Westemeier 2011-02-11 08:18:30 UTC

The FW is claimed GPLv2. Info & source can be found under http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/carl9170.fw

Greetings, Jens.

Comment 4 Greg Kroah-Hartman 2011-08-12 23:14:24 UTC

the upstream developer needs to do this, I don't have the rights to do so, sorry.