[Libreboot] x200 wlan0 stays "Hard blocked"

[Stephen Soltesz]

Hi, all!

I received my x200 last week from Francis and verified that everything
worked, including wireless networking. Since I am accustomed to a US
keyboard, I swapped my x200's UK keyboard for one with a US layout. I
made a backup of the libreboot rom[1] and then flashed an updated
libreboot rom[2] to default to the US keymap (and still boot the
preinstalled OS).

But, after these steps, I noticed that the wireless card[3] was stuck
in a "hard blocked" state.

    $ rfkill list all
    0: phy0: Wireless LAN
            Soft blocked: no
            Hard blocked: yes

The Fn+F5 keys on the x200 keyboard continues to toggle the Soft
blocked state, but I cannot reset the Hard blocked state after reboot
or any key combinations (apparently).

So, I tried to restore the system to the its original state; I
swapping the keyboards again back to the UK layout, and then reflashed
the backup libreboot rom. Unfortunately, the wireless card is still in
a "Hard blocked" state and unusable.

>From your experiences, does it sound possible that the steps I took
have disabled the wireless card? Is there some initialization that
libreboot performs after first boot that I may have accidentally wiped
away? Is there a way to reenable the wireless card?

If more information would be helpful, I'm happy to provide it.

Thank you so much,
Stephen



[1]: flashrom -p internal -r libreboot.rom
[2]: the binary builds from https://ginette.swordarmor.fr/libreboot/20150208/
      bin/x200_8mb/x200_8mb_usqwerty_vesafb.rom
[3]: Qualcomm Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express)
  $ lshw  -C network
  *-network DISABLED
       description: Wireless interface
       product: AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express)
       vendor: Qualcomm Atheros
       physical id: 0
       bus info: address@hidden:02:00.0
       logical name: wlan0
       version: 01
       serial: 00:26:5e:4b:bd:3f
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet
physical wireless
       configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k
driverversion=3.13.0-39-lowlatency firmware=N/A latency=0 link=no
multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn
       resources: irq:17 memory:e1500000-e150ffff

    [... eth0 snipped ...]