iwl3945 delays boot and fails to properly init ( 2 issues )

Dragonlord · Guru Joined: 22 Aug 2004 Posts: 446 Location: Switzerland

Some laptop around here with one of this sucking intel wifi chipsets in it ( god I hate them ). Put iwl3945 on it since it's now a .27 kernel and the old ipw doesn't work on those anymore. The module itself seems to work ( could not test yet, see problems below ) but there are a couple of nasty issues which maybe somebody knows a fix for.

At first the boot hangs for nearly half a minute around the udev population and barks out with an error that the network device wmaster0_rename could not be renamed to some proper name ( and accuses my system of having troubles renaming devices... pfft ). Boot works splendid without the iwl module compiled in so it's this wmaster0_rename that blocks booting. Any ideas how to about it? What exactly causes this notorious stalling during udev time?

The second problem is the device initialization. The RF kill switch is by default off since we do not want to tell any moron near us that we are using a laptop with permanently enabled wifi. Unfortunately gentoo always tries to bring up eth1 ( which is the wlan device ) but since the kill switch is off any attempts to init the device fails with IOCTRL failures ( of course, that's what an RF switch is for after all ). Is there any way to prevent gentoo from trying to mess with the eth1 device on startup and simply leave it in down state?
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Jan 09, 2009 3:56 pm Post subject:

Dragonlord,

Delete your /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file. This is what causes your rename issue.
At your next boot, or kick udev, it will be recreated. Your wireless will get a new name, probably wlan0.

You need to edit /etc/rc.conf to fix the issue of both interfaces being started. Read the comments in the file.
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NeddySeagoon

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Dragonlord · Guru Joined: 22 Aug 2004 Posts: 446 Location: Switzerland

Did the trick. No idea why this rules file still lingered around. /etc/conf.d/rc also fixed the bootup issue. Now the only thing that would be nice is if gentoo would eventually learn to use Wifi with OpenSwan on the GUI level ( I need two scripts to fix those right now... nasty... requiring tons of sudo entries U.=.U )
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