Hi P1ngu1n,
"I upgraded the Kernel only and wifi was no longer available."
That will actually likely be the problem and it's probably not the Kernel itself that is breaking Wifi. To make the Wifi work you'll need a few things such as the firmware and drivers for your Wireless card, however the packages you need will depend on the Wireless card. The drivers can either be built in to the kernel itself or may need an additional driver module package installing which *must* match the version of the kernel (e.g for a 4.11.5.200 Kernel you need a matching 4.11.5.200 driver module), so if you upgrade the kernel *only* and there is no matching Wifi module it won't work.
To figure out what you need, you'll first need to figure out what hardware the Wifi card is. So boot in to the old Kernel with working Wifi. As above, there's no need to rebuild, you should get a text based "grub" menu as soon as you boot (actually I have to hold the left alt key when I hear the "dong*" noise on my Mac or it boots MacOS). Once you're in and Wifi is working run:
Code:
[root@darkstar ~]# lspci |egrep -i "wifi|wireless"
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Limited BCM4360 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 03)
Once we know what card you have we can look at what modules packages are installed, and for which Kernel versions. You may need to add the rpmfusion repo to get the right modules.
Possible Quick Fix:
Instead of researching which "Kernel version matching modules" are installed for each kernel, if you boot in to the kernel with the working Wifi and run the following:
Code:
[root@darkstar ~]# rpm -qa |grep $(uname -r)
kernel-headers-4.11.5-200.fc25.x86_64
kernel-core-4.11.5-200.fc25.x86_64
kernel-modules-4.11.5-200.fc25.x86_64
kernel-devel-4.11.5-200.fc25.x86_64
perf-4.11.5-200.fc25.x86_64
kernel-4.11.5-200.fc25.x86_64
kmod-wl-4.11.5-200.fc25.x86_64-6.30.223.271-11.fc25.x86_64
You'll get a list of rpm packages installed for the current running Kernel. You can then repeat that command on the Kernel which isn't working and compare what's missing. For me it would be the "kmod-wl" package which is my Broadcom Wireless driver.
NOTE: It's often the case with new Kernel releases that the matching distro driver modules lag behind the release slightly as the maintainers need to update their packages. Sometimes you have to boot the old kernel for a little while until the new kernel module is released... unless you want to get in the habit of compiling your own drivers etc which, imho, is more effort than it's worth these days.
*Does anyone else with a macbook think that *dong* noise sounds like the first not of "Nothing Comapres to You" by Sinead O'Connor?? I can't boot my Mac without that getting stuck in my head... and I hate that song!