Bugzilla – Bug 691073
Driver rt2800pci is not configured in standard kernels
Last modified: 2012-08-02 15:53:57 UTC
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0 The driver for the PCI variants of the Ralink RT2800, RT3090, et al. is not enabled in the standard kernels. I have checked default for i386 and desktop for x86_64. To fix this, "CONFIG_RT2800PCI=m" is needed instead of "@CONFIG_2800PCI is not set" in .config. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
This bug seems to affect also 12.1 and did affect 11.3 in the past. While we always had rt2860sta to get rt2860 based pci wifi cards running, this staging driver seems to have been removed from kernel 3.0. That means, in the future everyone with such a wifi card will rely on rt2800pci being correctly configured. Cheers Frank
Having seen forum thread (experiences of 12.1 M2) I looked into the answer to someone's implied question on "why rt2800pci is not configured in standard kernels", I'll just document the answer I found. This bug https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=606243 "rt2800pci driver attaches to RT2860-based devices by default" needs resolving, before rt28000pci can be re-enabled. Not sure how to use the "dependency" feature of Bugzilla trying to add the bug # whilst crossing my fingers.
With kernel 3.0, the code for rt2860 and rt2870 are removed. At that point, both rt2800pci and rt2800usb can and should be enabled. The OP should blacklist rt2860sta and implement compat-wireless. As the c-w package is too old, that will require a build from souurce.
At least now I know that there has been a reason to disable it. Nice ;-) Though I believe that I used the kernel rt2800pci in the past, i.e. < 11.3, and it worked. But I might be wrong since I pretty early figured out that there is the compat-wireless package providing newer versions. BTW for me the compat-wireless package from here: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/driver:/wireless/openSUSE_11.4/ works perfectly even in n mode, whereas with rt2860sta I only can use g mode. So I think there is a good reason for removing rt2860sta in kernel 3.0. The bugs which were mentioned in bug 606243 seem to be solved.
Drivers in staging such as rt2860sta only get minimal updates as they are usually vendor-written and of poor quality. Once rt2800pci, which is in the mainline kernel, was improved to the point of usability, removal of the staging driver was the best course. One thing that delayed the changeover was some difficulty in getting the firmware accepted. Sometimes maintainers are like mules and require similar persuasion. :) I am glad to hear that the c-w package from the repo works for you.
Now I wonder if 12.1 will get kernel 3.0 and finally my wireless card will work perfectly out-of-the-box? I saw that in factory there are already the 3.0rc5 packages... :-) ... but I just checked and CONFIG_RT2800PCI is still not set :-(
Can Jeff Mahoney safely revert in Kernel:HEAD then https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=606243#c1 - Disabled CONFIG_RT2800PCI (bnc#606243) - These devices are handled by the rt2860 staging driver. Which looks like it's no longer applicable, so users have something installable to test on 11.4 or higher? I guess it's probably latish for 12.1 M3 already.
Yes. Jeff should enable the build of rt2800pci in all kernels and disable the build of rt2860 for kernels older than 3.0. These two threads show the ugly part of having drivers in staging. They can be difficult to kill once the mainline driver becomes available and/or better.
I had this problem on my netbook with factory's 3.0.0-2 kernel, but upgrading to 3.0.0-4 brought a rt2800pci.ko so will probably be good for 12.1
Not surprisingly in 12.1 rt2800pci works out of the box. On the other hand, for 11.4 the situation hasn't changed. The current kernel 2.6.37.6-0.9 and the one in testing, i.e. 2.6.37.6-0.11, still do not configure the rt2800pci module. Since I don't like forgotten open bugs which will never see any action but blow up bug lists, I propose to close this one. I'm not sure if I could do this myself. In any case I prefer to wait a little for reactions. BTW above statement is not meant as an offense. It's just my personal taste. And if you browse bug lists of other projects you will see that it is unfortunately very common to fill bug lists with old open but irrelevant bugs. Cheers and happy new year Frank
With the coming release of openSUSE 12.2, openSUSE kernel developers are focusing their efforts there. Reports against openSUSE 11.4 and prior will not get the attention needed to resolve them before openSUSE 12.2 is release and openSUSE 11.4 becomes unmaintained. Please re-test with openSUSE 12.1 or openSUSE RC2+ and re-open with an updated Product if you still encounter your issue. We apologize for this issue not getting the attention it deserves but we are focusing our resources in the area where they will have the most impact for our users. We're working hard to make openSUSE 12.2 the best openSUSE release yet!