Older(?) NM/MM attempting to use wlanX interface for ppp

[Bjørn Mork <bjorn mork no>]

Hello,

experience shows that end users often report kernel related bugs to
their distro, and not all distros are as good as Debian wrt forwarding
these. So I did a quick Google search for qmi_wwan related bugs to see
if I had missed something important.

These popped up in Fedora 17, in addition to a few duplicates of the
already fixed Gobi probe bummer:
 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=834871
 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=835153

I believe they are both the same problem: NM/MM is somehow so confused
by the new wwan0 interface that it fails to connect.  I see the latter
bug is assigned to Dan, so I trust it is in good hands.  But this
problem is probably not Fedora specific and I think it needs a generic
solution.

And I'd really prefer this solved somehow without blacklisting the
driver, which currently seems like the simplest workaround.  You'll
never get a blacklist removed once configured, so these interfaces won't
be there anymore when NM/MM starts supporting them.  And even worse:
The blacklist will then prevent the driver from supporting newer/other
modems.

AFAICS, there is no possible way for the driver to avoid this problem,
short of disabling itself.  Which doesn't make much sense...

Therefore I am hoping to get some advice here.  Is there some way to
make the NM/MM versions in Fedora 17 (and presumably many other
distributions) silently ignore the new and yet unsupported wwanX modem
interfaces?  It should just continue using the serial interfaces until
it has support for QMI/wwan.  Why doesn't it?

IMHO, this should warrant a "NM/MM stable" update if necessary.  I
realize that userspace applications like NM/MM are somewhat special in
their need to tie to specific drivers, but a bug preventing driver
improvements is really bad...

I expect a storm of these problems once all major distributions upgrade
their kernels to 3.4+, unless we can get this fixed ASAP in the current
stable NM/MM and pushed that fix to the distros in the same timeframe.


Bjørn