Bookworm 6.1.30 - wi-fi don't work.

[Energokom]

Bookworm 6.1.30 - wi-fi don't work.

 

[mc510]

Yeah, just noticed this myself.

 

I was pleased that Armbian 23.05 started up just fine on my Orange Pi Zero (H3 LTS), seeing as other discussions had said that Allwinner 32bit was not working.

 

Wireless is definitely not working OOTB, however. I updated firmware in armbian-config, but the Networking options don't show a wifi option. Neither ifconfig nor nmtui-connect list a wireless interface. No messages from xradio in dmesg.

 

I think maybe I saw a mention in an old forum post that the xradio driver doesn't work with kernel 6.x, so maybe that's it? Or maybe it's just not set up quite right? Or maybe there's something that users need to do in order to get it working?

 

In spite of the terrible reputation of the xradio driver, it was working adequately for me in Armbian bullseye. Very much hope that I can get it working in latest Armbian!

Edited June 21, 2023 by mc510

[mc510]

I see that there's a task called "Enable xradio on Kernel 6.1" so I guess that suggests that some special work was/is needed.

 

I don't know how to read the notes, but it kind of looks like this fix is targeted for Armbian 23.08, so the next stable release in August.

 

Also https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/4682 suggests that this is targeted for 23.08

 

Hope this information is helpful to any other OPi0 users who are surprised to find wifi missing in Armbian 23.05.

Edited June 21, 2023 by mc510

[Igor]

9 hours ago, mc510 said:

xradio driver doesn't work with kernel 6.x

That is correct. Many people already tried to fix this, I also spent few days but more I can't ... but I got information that someone else succeeded and its "just" integration and testing. But there are more problems to be resolved before cheapest WiFi on one board. Perhaps in 23.08, but in free software we can't give promises.

[robertoj]

Anyone using the XRadio 819 chip... do a test with speedtest-cli and iperf3, in a 5.x kernel (old images)

 

In my case, it was just kilobytes per second.

[robertoj]

In a recent test, under linux 5.x, I got my orange pi zero xr819 to upload and download at several megabytes per second  .

 

But this time it was connected to my OpenWRT router (last time it was on a Verizon router).

[Energokom]

Wi-fi on the built-in chip could not be started?

[Werner]

1 hour ago, Energokom said:

Wi-fi on the built-in chip could not be started?

Read below

On 6/22/2023 at 7:54 AM, Igor said:

That is correct. Many people already tried to fix this, I also spent few days but more I can't ... but I got information that someone else succeeded and its "just" integration and testing. But there are more problems to be resolved before cheapest WiFi on one board. Perhaps in 23.08, but in free software we can't give promises.

 

[Energokom]

1 hour ago, Werner said:

Perhaps in 23.08

23.08 is now. So I asked

[Werner]

Seems like problem persists.

[Igor]

20 hours ago, Energokom said:

23.08 is now. So I asked

If you opt for 1 year for Community Hero, you are not going to cover damages your request made to our non-profit organisation:

https://forum.armbian.com/subscriptions/ 

We fixed the problem and it will be released when possible.
 

root@orangepizero:~# iperf3 -c 192.168.29.129
Connecting to host 192.168.29.129, port 5201
[  5] local 192.168.29.132 port 41820 connected to 192.168.29.129 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate         Retr  Cwnd
[  5]   0.00-1.00   sec  2.08 MBytes  17.5 Mbits/sec    0    106 KBytes       
[  5]   1.00-2.00   sec  1.93 MBytes  16.2 Mbits/sec    0    136 KBytes       
[  5]   2.00-3.00   sec  1.86 MBytes  15.6 Mbits/sec    0    136 KBytes       
[  5]   3.00-4.00   sec  1.68 MBytes  14.1 Mbits/sec    0    136 KBytes       
[  5]   4.00-5.00   sec  1.86 MBytes  15.6 Mbits/sec    0    143 KBytes       
[  5]   5.00-6.00   sec  1.86 MBytes  15.6 Mbits/sec    0    143 KBytes       
[  5]   6.00-7.00   sec  2.05 MBytes  17.2 Mbits/sec    0    182 KBytes       
[  5]   7.00-8.00   sec  1.99 MBytes  16.7 Mbits/sec    0    228 KBytes       
[  5]   8.00-9.00   sec  1.74 MBytes  14.6 Mbits/sec    0    228 KBytes       

 

 

[mc510]

On 9/3/2023 at 6:31 AM, Igor said:

We fixed the problem and it will be released when possible.

That is fabulous news (and I hope you don't come to later regret it)!

Is your best guess that it will land in 23.11, or as an update to 23.08?

[Simon_stz]

Another one affected.
Just posting to get notifications 😉

 

Thank you Igor for your time and help.

 

[Freedom8930]

Unfortunately, some of us are too stupid and can't handle not typing in `apt upgrade` to get the new shiny.

 

To revert the damage, boot into the serial console and run

 

sudo apt-get install linux-image-current-sunxi=23.02.2 armbian-firmware=23.02.2 armbian-bsp-cli-orangepizero=23.02.2

 

And then to prevent upgrade aquisition syndrome from ruining your life again:

 

sudo apt-mark hold linux-image-current-sunxi armbian-firmware armbian-bsp-cli-orangepizero

[Gunjan Gupta]

Until the kernel gets published to normal repository, which we do when creating a new release, you can install latest kernel from beta repository i.e change apt.armbian.com to beta.armbian.com in apt configuration.

[Freedom8930]

Looks like this is the patch: https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/03dd4d02df16083c8902613a6338c2f292e6ccee https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/46e756540eb01cbefb31cad744e04afc4282e0e0. There haven't been any tags in this repo since February, so it's not easy to tell what releases this package is in, but I think it's in all available nightly packages.

 

I was able to upgrade with the following commands (to avoid any extra packages from being updated):

 

echo 'deb http://beta.armbian.com bullseye main bullseye-utils bullseye-desktop' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian-beta.list
printf 'Package: *\nPin: origin beta.armbian.com\nPin-Priority: 10\n\nPackage: armbian-bsp-cli-orangepizero armbian-firmware linux-image-current-sunxi linux-dtb-current-sunxi\nPin: origin beta.armbian.com\nPin-Priority: 501' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/armbian-beta.pref
sudo apt-mark unhold armbian-bsp-cli-orangepizero armbian-firmware linux-image-current-sunxi linux-dtb-current-sunxi
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

 

I can confirm that this has fixed the wifi--thank you for the tip! @Gunjan Gupta

Edited September 18, 2023 by Freedom8930

[Gunjan Gupta]

10 minutes ago, Freedom8930 said:

Looks like this is the patch: https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/03dd4d02df16083c8902613a6338c2f292e6ccee.

 

That was an early attempt to enable xradio in edge kernel. But that actually didn't worked out. The working fix is here - https://github.com/armbian/build/commit/46e756540eb01cbefb31cad744e04afc4282e0e0

[mc510]

Great news that the xradio fix has been released 😀!  Based on this news I have used armbian-config to unfreeze kernel/firmware updates on my 23.02 installation. After apt upgrade and reboot I am on kernel 6.1.53 and wifi is working. But boot message says I'm still on 23.02, and apt says that armbian-bsp-cli-orangepizero is being held back.

 

sudo apt install armbian-bsp-cli-orangepizero
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 armbian-bsp-cli-orangepizero-current : Depends: base-files (>= 23.8.3) but 23.8.1-bullseye is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Edited September 22, 2023 by mc510

[Werner]

2 hours ago, mc510 said:

But boot message says I'm still on 23.02

This seems mostly a cosmetical issue. Since kernel upgrade seem to have worked properly there is nothing to worry about for now.

[robertoj]

Thank you to all the Armbian team for fixing wifi for the orange pi zero.

 

I had to work with 5.x, but now I could upgrade to 6.x finally

 

mc510: i used this to upgrade distribution https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUpgrade (there are 2 apt files) and the login welcome message shows all the versions right, even with the lsb_release -a

[Андрей Солодухин]

Please provide complete instructions for setting up wifi, I tried a bunch of distributions and only the official one worked well, but the microphone does not work in it. I'm using orange pi zero 3.

[Werner]

2 hours ago, Андрей Солодухин said:

orange pi zero 3

Armbian does not support this device. This topic is also not about zero3 but the original zero which has exactly zero (lol) in common with the zero3.