12.04 eee-pc wifi: sudden RTL8192SE firmware errors

[jglick]

Trying to analyze a sudden and complete WiFi failure on my wife's Asus EeePC 1001PXD. WiFi generally worked fine in 11.10; sometimes took a long time and several attempts to connect, sometimes connected immediately, but always at least detected available networks and eventually would be fine. A few days ago, upgraded to 12.04 (x86, 3.2.0-24 kernel); tested WiFi and everything seemed fine.

Today she was using the netbook, with WiFi working, and suddenly the network stopped responding. (The wireless router was up and an unrelated laptop continued to be online.) After rebooting, there is no indication of wireless hardware in the machine at all - nothing displayed in nm-applet, iwconfig does not show the interface, lspci does not seem to list the card. The rtl8192se kernel module can be modprobe'd but is not loaded by default. Wired eth0 works fine. Booting an older (2.6.x) kernel does not help.

Checking the kernel error log, saw many errors like the following:

rtl8192se:_rtl92s_firmware_checkready():<0-0> FW_STATUS_LOAD_IMEM FAIL CPU, Status=0
rtl8192se:_rtl92s_firmware_checkready():<0-0> FW_STATUS_LOAD_EMEM FAIL CPU, Status=0
rtl8192se:_rtl92s_firmware_checkready():<0-0> Polling DMEM code done fail ! cpustatus(0x0)
rtl8192se:rtl92s_phy_bb_config():<0-0> RF_Type(0) does not match RF_Num(0)!!
rtl8192se:rtl92s_phy_bb_config():<0-0> path1 0x0, path2 0x0, pathmap 0x0
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan1: link is not ready
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan1: link is not ready
rtl8192se:_rtl92s_firmware_checkready():<0-0> FW_STATUS_LOAD_EMEM FAIL CPU, Status=17
rtl8192se:_rtl92s_firmware_checkready():<0-0> Polling Load Firmware ready fail ! cpustatus(17)
rtl8192se:rtl92s_phy_chk_fwcmd_iodone():<0-0> Set FW Cmd fail!!

Kill switch is on:

# rfkill list all
0: asus-wlan: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no

Any clues?

[jglick]

I think "solved" in that the WiFi card appears broken also in Windows 7. So either a sudden hardware failure, or somehow corrupted firmware (?).

[jglick]

For the record: I booted again into Windows 7, hoping to use the BIOS upgrade tool, on the off chance an old BIOS was at fault. But this time, after Windows had installed 28 unspecified "updates", WiFi was working fine. So I rebooted back into Ubuntu, and WiFi worked fine in Linux too!

[jglick]

Happened again, after issue described in "Intermittent wifi "deauthenticated from ... (Reason: 6)" on Oneiric w/ rtl8192se". WiFi was fine in Windows 7; this time I updated BIOS from 0601 to 0703 in case it was a BIOS bug (0702 had the changelog entry "Update EC firmware"). After rebooting into Linux, working so far but that does not prove much.