Re: [gentoo-user] Unable to set wireless regulatory domain

[John Nielsen]

Doesn't look like this went through the first time; re-sending without attachment.

On May 5, 2011, at 6:52 PM, Paul Hartman wrote:

> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 12:40 PM, John Nielsen <lists@××××××××.net> wrote:
>> I am trying to set up a 5GHz wireless access point on an Alix 3d2 board with an AR9220 (ath9k "Merlin") PCI card. I have done so successfully using Fedora 14 on identical hardware but I would greatly prefer to use Gentoo so I can use a more recent kernel and customize things appropriately for the platform.
>
> It seems like everything is pretty much the same, other than the
> kernel (and presumably the ath9k driver). But I would look at the udev
> rules for CRDA to be sure they match and are being applied the same on
> both systems. You shouldn't ever need to "iw reg set" on a system with
> CRDA, it should do it for you. So I wonder if you're setting it, and
> then CRDA is immediately setting it back to 00...

The udev rule for CRDA is the same on both systems, and matches what is shown on http://wireless.kernel.org/en/developers/Regulatory/CRDA. The Fedora box also has a magic rule to call /sbin/setregdomain when an 80211 interface is added, which is a shell script that infers the regdomain from the currently set timezone. The punch line of the script is simply a call to "iw reg set $COUNTRY"

However, I'm not sure crda is being called appropriately on the Gentoo box. On the Fedora machine I see this in dmesg:

>> [   17.248674] cfg80211: Calling CRDA for country: US
>> [   18.848206] cfg80211: Regulatory domain changed to country: US

and I don't ever see anything similar on the Gentoo machine, even when running "iw reg set" by hand. Further, I don't see anything in the output of "udevadm monitor --environment kernel".

I just dropped the kernel from the Fedora machine on to the Gentoo box and (somewhat surprisingly) it works just fine. The reg domain gets set no problem, hostapd starts, life is good--except that now I feel like I've sinned against nature and I'd like to get my own, smaller kernel back.

While it's possible the new kernel version is broken I rather suspect that I have configured it badly. I set out to configure a minimal kernel with just the features and drivers I want on this hardware and no need for modules or an initramfs. Does cfg80211 need to be a module to work properly? I wouldn't think so.

I'll do some more experimenting but in the mean time here's my kernel config in case anyone has ideas on what could be wrong. Thanks!

Config file here: http://pastebin.com/S68ye6Pz

JN