12-22-2018, 07:03 AM
I am sitting here with a totally useless cluster of over £1300 worth of pinepro64 because the wifi module has been disabled in the 7.8 + build. Many people buy these clusters for testing off corporate networks for prototyping and technology evaluation where bleeding edge open source software can be downloaded without the usual security screening. The wifi module was purchased to act as a bastion host to achieve this goal, but have been thwarted because Pine sell a wifi module that cant be supported in linux!!
It would appear that there are issues with the PCIe interface and teh decision was taken to disable the wifi in favour keeping the PCIe stable.
I have no issues with this, but surely it would have been courteous to give people the choice to enable wifi or PCIe?
I too have a NVMe PCIe Disk to add but network access is *critical*.
Question: Has *anybody* been able to get the wifi module working full stop on the rockPro64 linux builds ?
I have tried 20 builds in 2 days of testing with no luck ... even a 7.7 bionic-lxde arm64 dose not seem to work,
even with this build rfkill seems to only see the BT interface [# rfkill list] device 0 there is not device 1 for wifi
there is also no wlan0 interface to configure,
### Deeper Dive ###
### OS Drivers ###
From the kern.log it appears that the wifi device is being detected as chip ap6354 and allocated IRQ 3
There is an entry for Rockchip WiFi chip interface (V1.00)
I can not see any errors to indicate that there is a HW detection issue or a driver initialization issue for the wifi module
There is also a kernal command line entry registering a MAC address of e6:72:16:1c:22:0e on a uart8250 device which is not the RJ45 Ethernet device and has no registered vendor, but this may well be something to do with the boot process mounting to the emmc chip that holds the root partition.... (so it looks like a red herring)
What I do see is a statement that;
"of_get_named_gpiod_flags: can't parse 'WIFI,poweren_gpio' property of node '/wirelesspwlan[0]'
So I am wondering if the disabling has been triggered by a GPIO pin.
If anybody has any documentation on this wifi device HW design, driver and intended configuration it would be appreciated.
When I solve this I will post back to the forum.
### HW ###
The Block diagram schematics seem to indicate that it shares the PCIe bus, although looking at the chips and pinouts it seems the module is supposed to be using;
UART interface for BlueTooth
SDIO interface for Wifi
What this has to do with PCIe I dont know ... i am going to have to do some research here to understand how different bus \ signalling technologies can share a PCIe interface,
It would appear that there are issues with the PCIe interface and teh decision was taken to disable the wifi in favour keeping the PCIe stable.
I have no issues with this, but surely it would have been courteous to give people the choice to enable wifi or PCIe?
I too have a NVMe PCIe Disk to add but network access is *critical*.
Question: Has *anybody* been able to get the wifi module working full stop on the rockPro64 linux builds ?
I have tried 20 builds in 2 days of testing with no luck ... even a 7.7 bionic-lxde arm64 dose not seem to work,
even with this build rfkill seems to only see the BT interface [# rfkill list] device 0 there is not device 1 for wifi
there is also no wlan0 interface to configure,
### Deeper Dive ###
### OS Drivers ###
From the kern.log it appears that the wifi device is being detected as chip ap6354 and allocated IRQ 3
There is an entry for Rockchip WiFi chip interface (V1.00)
I can not see any errors to indicate that there is a HW detection issue or a driver initialization issue for the wifi module
There is also a kernal command line entry registering a MAC address of e6:72:16:1c:22:0e on a uart8250 device which is not the RJ45 Ethernet device and has no registered vendor, but this may well be something to do with the boot process mounting to the emmc chip that holds the root partition.... (so it looks like a red herring)
What I do see is a statement that;
"of_get_named_gpiod_flags: can't parse 'WIFI,poweren_gpio' property of node '/wirelesspwlan[0]'
So I am wondering if the disabling has been triggered by a GPIO pin.
If anybody has any documentation on this wifi device HW design, driver and intended configuration it would be appreciated.
When I solve this I will post back to the forum.
### HW ###
The Block diagram schematics seem to indicate that it shares the PCIe bus, although looking at the chips and pinouts it seems the module is supposed to be using;
UART interface for BlueTooth
SDIO interface for Wifi
What this has to do with PCIe I dont know ... i am going to have to do some research here to understand how different bus \ signalling technologies can share a PCIe interface,