Whitelist restrictions encountered

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nadebula.1984
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Joined: 05/01/2018

I recently purchased one Toughbook made by Panasonic. It uses M.2 WLAN card with e-key. I have a few Atheros AR9462 cards with both a- and e-keys. However, when I installed this card, it is neither recognized by firmware nor operating system. In UEFI settings, no WLAN card is detected. Under GNU/Linux, lspci shows no WLAN devices. Thankfully this Toughbook doesn't have Boot Guard, so its still possible to replace the non-free firmware with coreboot.

Like other manufacturers like Lenovo and HP, Panasonic does impose certain restrictions on WLAN cards. Unlike Lenovo or HP, its whitelist restrictions don't prevent operating system from booting, but they deny access to any unauthorized card. I could only hope that Panasonic didn't modify the pin definition of the M.2 interface, so AR9462 (the only M.2 ath9k card) could still be usable once the whitelist restrictions were no more.