Bug 90440 – ipw2200 Firmware fails to load during 2005.0 boot up

• Product: Gentoo Release Media
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description Bryan 2005-04-25 15:22:17 UTC]

When the livecd is booted up, ipw2200 module firmware fails to load.  dmesg shows errors:
ipw2200: unable to load firmware: 0xFFFFFFFE
ipw2200: failed to register network device
ipw2200: probe of 0000:06:03.0 failed with error -5

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Boot from livecd
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
firmware failed to load and eth0 doesnt not appear under ifconfig -a

Expected Results:  
firmware should have loaded and eth0 should appear under ifconfig -a

[Comment 1 Henrik Brix Andersen 2005-04-25 15:25:46 UTC]

I successfully helped the reporter on irc:

00:06:51 <@brix> frostedeg: try 'echo -n "60" > /sys/class/firmware/timeout'
00:07:10 <@brix> frostedeg: then 'modprobe -r ipw2200 && modprobe ipw2200'
00:08:13 < frostedeg> bingo
00:08:16 < frostedeg> got eth0 now

This issue is tracked upstream as http://bughost.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=601

[Comment 2 Marco Marzetti 2005-05-19 12:25:10 UTC]

This does not works for me, even trying 

echo 100 > /sys/class/firmware/timeout
modprobe -r ipw2200 && modprobe ipw2200

[Comment 3 Dima Diall 2005-05-31 02:05:26 UTC]

I was running ipw2200 v1.0.4 and firmware v2.3 successfully (latest at this
time) and sudenly the firmware stopped loading as described here.

The only thing I remember doing was a change somewhere in /etc/modules.* to
change the alias from 'eth1' to 'wlan0', but it didnt work as expected and I
reverted to the previous configuration. After that the driver stopped working
correctly.

Actually the last time I actually successfully used the wireless interface was a
week ago, under 2.6.10 but in the meantime upgraded to 2.6.11-suspend2 (thans
Brix for the convenient ebuild :-)

I didn't touch hotplug or anything else that seems to be related and confirmed
that the directory firmware is correct. I tried downgrade the firmware to v2.2
with no luck, and then tried ipw2200 v.1.0.3 and it worked (even with firmware
2.3). So I am leaving it working like this as I don't have time right now to dig
further...

[Comment 4 nefercheprure 2005-08-13 02:00:26 UTC]

A similar problem occured after "emerge -u system" on an installed gentoo. After
some investigations I have found the

echo 100 > /sys/class/firmware/timeout

solution elsewhere. It works only partially, however. (It shows a
nondeterministic behavior: sometimes it works, sometimes it does not.) After
further investigation I figured out that /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug contains
/sbin/udevsend. Setting it to /sbin/hotplug eliminated the problem altogether.

The problem started with the upgrade of udev from 045 to 058, because /sbin/rc
sets the /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug to /sbin/udevsend based on the version of udev.

Therefore, this could possibly be construed a bug in udev and/or /sbin/rc.

As a temporary solution, the line:

echo "/sbin/udevsend" > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug

in /sbin/rc can be commented out.

[Comment 5 Chris Gianelloni (RETIRED) 2005-08-15 11:38:28 UTC]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 87103 ***