No Wifi adapter after RK3588+M.2 Wifi card upgrade

MNT Pocket Reform
1

I just installed the RK3588 module and the included Wifi adapter in my Pocket but now no Wifi adapter is detected after rebooting (several times just in case).

The networking menu in Waybar only shows the Ethernet connection and ethernet does work as expected with the cable adapter.

I installed the Wifi adapter according to the instructions, secured it with the included screw and used the new antenna (attached to the new backplate). I removed the old antenna.

084A0012
084A00122184Ă—1464 343 KB

(the antenna cable is connected, i just didn’t take a photo of that before closing the case again.

Edit: I have run an apt update && apt upgrade (followed by a reboot) to get the latest versions of everything already.

2

lshw only shows the ethernet adapter too

$ sudo lshw -class network
  *-network                 
       description: Ethernet interface
       physical id: e
       logical name: end0
       serial: 7a:dd:4b:86:49:72
       size: 1Gbit/s
       capacity: 1Gbit/s
       capabilities: ethernet physical tp mii 10bt-fd 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation
       configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=st_gmac driverversion=6.14.6-mnt-reform-arm64 duplex=full ip=192.168.178.76 link=yes multicast=yes port=twisted pair speed=1Gbit/s
3

I opened it up to check, looks the way it should (I think) according to the upgrade instructions

IMG_5777
IMG_57771920Ă—1440 329 KB

4

A hunch: maybe you do not have the firmware package installed to get this wifi card to work?

You could check your sudo dmesg output to see if linux fails to load some wifi related firmware during boot? Or maybe dmesg has some other clue as to what is going on?

5 
$ sudo dmesg --level=emerg,alert,crit,err
[    2.484753] panel-mnt-pocket-reform fde30000.dsi.0: error -ENOENT: cannot get reset-gpios 0
[    2.484767] panel-mnt-pocket-reform fde30000.dsi.0: error -ENOENT: cannot get dcdc-en-gpio 0
[    2.665905] panel-mnt-pocket-reform fde30000.dsi.0: [mnt pocket reform display] read register 12a: 0x77
[    2.802177] rtc-pcf8523 6-0068: hctosys: unable to read the hardware clock
[   11.369165] systemd[1]: bpf-restrict-fs: Failed to load BPF object: No such process
[   12.482838] panthor fb000000.gpu: [drm] *ERROR* Failed to load firmware image 'mali_csffw.bin'
[   12.483046] panthor fb000000.gpu: probe with driver panthor failed with error -2
[   12.635753] optee firmware:optee: probe with driver optee failed with error -22
[   12.680567] asoc-audio-graph-card analog-sound: ASoC: driver name too long 'rk3588-tlv320aic3100' -> 'rk3588-tlv320ai'
[   13.933159] mt76x2u 2-1.4:1.0: probe with driver mt76x2u failed with error -2

that last line seems related to the Wifi adapter?

6

Looks like your wifi is the mt76x2u which needs the package firmware-mediatek. Do you have that installed? What is your output of sudo reform-check? That should show you which firmware packages are expected to be installed but are not installed on your system.

7

Yes, reform-check had a whole bunch of complaints, including firmware-misc-nonfree which contains the mediatek package too.

Now Wifi works. Thanks @josch :slight_smile:

Weird though, I ran it a couple days ago and didn’t get any of them. Is this all due to the new CPU module?

8

Probably you’ve already seen this, but just to make sure, in your dmesg snippet the panthor driver couldn’t load because of missing Mali CSF firmware, so that would prevent GPU acceleration from working. But IIRC that’s part of firmware-misc-nonfree as well, does the GPU work now?

9

I haven’t tested anything GPU related yet so no idea :slight_smile:

And now the firmware is installed anyway.

10

Threads like these make me want to add functionality to reform-check which is able to find out that a piece of hardware is present (probably by looking it up in /sys) while the responsible piece of firmware is not. I think at least for the hardware shipped by MNT store such a check would be useful to avoid issues like in this thread early.

@minute I don’t have the hardware here, so if you or anybody else with access to all the wifi chips and panthor graphics could send me some /sys nodes I should check for and which firmware files they each need, I can add this. :slight_smile:

1 Like
11

No, the list of packages that reform-tools recommends to install is still the same across all CPU modules. Though that should probably change (see my last message). What did change is that the logic how the needed packages are computed is very different now. Instead of carrying a hard-coded list of packages, there are now some meta-packages called reform-desktop-full and reform-desktop-minimal and reform-check just tests whether their Depends and Recommends are installed or not. This should become smarter in case of the firmware packages but I do not (yet) have an rk3588. :smiley: