[ASUS X55C] Cannot enable wifi again using wireless hotkey

[AceLan Kao]

After using wireless hotkey to disable wireless,
it cannot be turned on again using wireless hotkey.

Steps:
1. Press wireless hotkey to disable wireless
2. Press wireless hotkey to enable wireless - but doesn't work

Expected results: Wireless hotkey can reopen the wireless

Actual results: The wifi is still be blocked

When using Fn + F2 to disable wireless, rfkill shows the wireless network interfaces are soft blocked:

0: phy0: Wireless LAN
      Soft blocked: yes
      Hard blocked: no
1: asus-wlan: Wireless LAN
      Soft blocked: yes
      Hard blocked: no

And when we press Fn + F2 again, it should show all "no" in rfkill, but it has a "yes" in it:

0: phy0: Wireless LAN
      Soft blocked: no
      Hard blocked: yes
1: asus-wlan: Wireless LAN
      Soft blocked: no
      Hard blocked: no

So the wireless is still be blocked.
If I remove asus_nb_wmi, the bug cannot be reproduced.

[AceLan Kao (acelankao)]

Patch is submitted to upstream.

This issue affects the following ASUS machines
X401U, X401A1, X501U, X501A1, X55A, X55C, X55U, and X55VD

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

@AceLan -- this seems to be in Linus' tree now, could you submit it to kernel-team@

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "0001-asus-nb-wmi-add-wapf-quirk-for-ASUS-machines.patch" of this bug report has been identified as being a patch. The ubuntu-reviewers team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review the patch. In the event that this is in fact not a patch you can resolve this situation by removing the tag 'patch' from the bug report and editing the attachment so that it is not flagged as a patch. Additionally, if you are member of the ubuntu-reviewers team please also unsubscribe the team from this bug report.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by Brian Murray. Please contact him regarding any issues with the action taken in this bug report.]

[AceLan Kao (acelankao)]

The patch is in 3.5 mainstream kernel

commit d2044c5a3aafac552d28c1add16930821c24cbd0
Author: AceLan Kao <email address hidden>
Date: Wed Jul 4 11:19:08 2012 +0800

    asus-nb-wmi: add wapf quirk for ASUS machines

    The BIOS of these machines will try to enable/disable wifi/bt in
    their own sqeuence. It won't read the enable/disable parameter
    in WMI command, but just iterates the wifi/bt's status described below
    1st. enable wifi, enable bt
    2nd. disable wifi, enable bt
    3rd. enable wifi, disable bt
    4th. disable wifi, disable bt
    That will totally mess up the rfkill status, since we will try to read
    wifi and bt's status and reset it again while booting up.

    To avoid this, these machines should set the wapf value to 4,
    that will let software totally control the wifi/bt's status and
    BIOS will do nothing instead of sending out the 0x88(KEY_RFKILL) event
    instead of 0x5e(wifi enable), 0x5f(wifi diable), 0x7d(bt enable), and
    0x7e(bt disable) through WMI.

    With this patch[1], it will handle the KEY_RFKILL event correctly and
    will block/unblock wifi and bt together.

    1. https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/5/21/75

    Signed-off-by: AceLan Kao <email address hidden>
    Signed-off-by: Matthew Garrett <email address hidden>

[Lonnie Lee Best (launchpad-startport)]

I was having a similar issue, and blacklisting asus-nb-wmi fixed it for me:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/linux/+bug/1172151

[Anthony Wong (anthonywong)]

Patch is now in Raring.

[ghomem (gustavo)]

We had the same problem with Asus K550c on 12.04.

Creating /etc/modprobe.d/asus.conf with

---------------------------------------------------------
options asus_nb_wmi wapf=4
---------------------------------------------------------

enables WLAN fixes it.

Neither this nor blacklisting the module make the fn-f2 combination work. The wifi LED doesn0t light up either.