Thanks for the prompt reply, but you're not correct when you state that
I didn't reproduce the issue in any way other than using wicd. In the
case of the Atheros card, I stopped wicd, put the wireless interface
down and back up, and then connected using the iw and iwconfig commands
from the terminal (or failed to connect, in the case of the 4.1 kernel).
My wireless connection is unencrypted, which is why I didn't think I
needed to use wpa_supplicant. I'll try network-manager tomorrow.
Regards, John Harrington
On 09/09/2015 06:36 PM, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann wrote:
reassign 798494 wicd
thanks
On 2015-09-09, John Harrington wrote:
Package: iw
Version: 3.17-1
Severity: important
Dear Maintainer,
My network manager (wicd) lost the ability to connect to my unsecured wireless
router when I upgraded from the 3.16-0-4-686-pae kernel to the 4.1.0-1-686-pae
kernel. It still works normally when I boot into the 3.16 kernel.
iw is a command line tool to query and modify the configuration of
cfg80211 based wlan cards via nl80211. To the best of my knowledge wicd
still has no concept of nl80211 and still depends on the obsolete wext
compatibility layer in order to speak to the kernel. Accordingly this
bug can't be in iw, as iw isn't even involved in the use case you
describe.
Therefore, from an initial 10'000 mile bird view, the packages involved
in your problem could be:
- src:linux
- crda/ wireless-regdb
- wpasupplicant
- wicd
but not iw.
The prime suspect would usually be the kernel upgrade, but considering
that you experience problems with vastly different kernel modules (ath5k
and iwlagn) suggests a more generic issue (and wlan as a whole certainly
isn't broken in linux 4.1 for everyone).
crda and wireless-regdb are only responsible for setting and obeying
the regulatory domain settings (allowed channels, ~transmit power, and
~features). Unless you're operating your device outside of its
specifications, these two packages aren't really an active component in
your problem.
wpasupplicant would be the next contender, but here the version didn't
really change between jessie (roughly corresponding to kernel 3.16) and
unstable (the difference between wpasupplicant 2.3-1+deb8u1 and 2.3-2 is
tiny and doesn't affect functionality).
wicd hasn't seen an uploaded since 2013, so at least no /change/ in wicd
could be made responsible for your issues either - except that no change
at all and using an obsolete API to talk to the kernel (wext) can be a
source of problems on its own. I'm still tentatively reassigning this bug
to wicd, as you apparently have only tried wicd as configuration and
connection management frontend and didn't reproduce the issue any other
way so far.
