SliTaz Forum

audios1ave

Member

Registered: 2014-05-11

Posts: 2

rolling: Fix for slow WiFi interface creation

Hello,

I use Slitaz on an ancient notebook with an USB WiFi dongle connected to a USB-1 port. The initialization of the WiFi dongle (modprobe ...) during boot is too slow and the network.sh tries to initialize the wlan0 interface (ifconfig ...) and starts wpa_supplicant before the interface is up. As a result the initialization fails and WiFi does not work. Running network.sh manually after the boot has completed is successful.

I've created the following enhancement to the /etc/init.d/network.sh:

[c]...
wifi() {
        if [ "$WIFI" = "yes" ] || fgrep -q "wifi" /proc/cmdline; then
# start: Patch for slow interace creation
                ii=1
                while [ $ii -le 20 ] && ! fgrep -q "$WIFI_INTERFACE" /proc/net/dev; do
                        ii='expr $ii + 1'
                        sleep 1
                        echo -n "."
                done
# end of patch
                ifconfig $INTERFACE down
                ...[/c]
The patch waits for normally 1 or 2 seconds until the interface wlan0 is fully created and then initializes and starts the WiFi connection.

This has fixed my problem, but everytime when network.sh is updated, I need to reinsert my little patch.

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced this behaviour and knows a better solution?

little edit: backticks in the code mess up the markup, hence I removed them and replaced them with normal ticks (')

Guest

Guest

Re: rolling: Fix for slow WiFi interface creation

Right:) plus it also happens running Slitaz on VM.

I solved on v4 bypassing completely pazpanel, running my own script... its not that pazpanel is bad, I just want more control on net..

About your patch, I solved it in a slight different way: I grep on iwconfig instead of /proc/net/dev, and also dont use expr, but the old ms-dos trick: ii=$ii# ; while [!"$ii" = "######"] and so on..

BTW, the full wire/wifi net support is where Slitaz4 shines most against his small ram live competitors! Congratulations!

audios1ave

Member

Registered: 2014-05-11

Posts: 2

Re: rolling: Fix for slow WiFi interface creation

Thanks for the info, I'm glad I'm not alone

I've actually started with Slitaz4, but for some reason the USB WiFi dongle did not deliver a stable connection but I experienced many networks outages. I didn't dig into it but successfully switched to rolling/cooking.

I was specifically not looking into an own script to fix the boot issue, since I'm kind of lazy and fear the higher maintenance especialy with fast moving develompements like in cooking/rolling.

Now I've adopted your ms-dos trick which of course does not fix my problem but looks nicer

Well, I'm still wondering, if we are the only ones with this timing issue. Maybe the slow interface creaion is related to specific hardware. My USB dongle is based on Ralink chipset using the following modules: rt2800usb,rt2x00usb,rt2800lib.

Guest

Guest

Re: rolling: Fix for slow WiFi interface creation

Well, you answered yourself: if you switched to cooking and there all works better, its not hardware related my USB dongle also has a different chipset.

That issue was always present, but it appears intermittently, not every time, thats why maybe some users dont mind just reboot and try again.. hehe:))

Infact Slitaz4 stable is shipped with a very outdated set of drivers/modules, some unusable nowadays... even if the modules structure is up-to-date,I personally had to patch the kernel and some modules, in order to successfully apply the latest backports.

I hope the new v5 kernel is automatically compatible with backports update procedures... cant stress more on that its really painful recompile the kernel and repatch modules every time...