For quite some time, I haven’t been able to use wireless communication on my HP EliteBook 8530w. All wireless communications (wifi, wwan, bluetooth) are listed as Hard Blocked by rfkill.

It appears, a kernel bug was introduces with Linux 3.13. This bug is in the hp-wmi kernel module, which controls the hardware buttons, including the wireless switch

My current kernel is 4.3.3, so,we obtain the source file for the hp-wmi for this kernel : https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/plain/drivers/platform/x86/hp-wmi.c?id=refs/tags/v4.3.3
We obtain the patch file https://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=122901

We apply the patch to the file

patch -p 4 < hp_wmi.patch

We put a Makefile with this file in it 

obj-$(CONFIG_HP_WMI)		+= hp-wmi.o

And we comile it 

make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=$PWD

Backup the original kernel module

mv /usr/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/hp-wmi.ko.gz /usr/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/hp-wmi.ko.gz.bak

And put the patched version in its place.

mv ./hp-wmi.ko.gz /usr/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/hp-wmi.ko.gz

When we press the wireless button now, rfkill reports Hard Blocked: no and we're able to use WiFi, Bluetooth and 3G again.

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