Breaking change in latest "testing" (2025 July): wpa_supplicant and nvme-tools

ARM
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Two new package in the latest “testing” update (July 2025) break PineBook Pro laptops:

  • nvme-tools v2.13: it’s reported in the wiki that new versions of nvme command line (including testing’s 2.13 and unstable’s 2.14) have changed their syntax and now use -V instead of -v for setting a feature’s value. This is NOT advertised in the notes that show up during pacman upgrade. If you have your root directory on an NVMe drive that cannot save power-limits permanently and you need to rely on a script in your initramfs to limit power before mounting the drive, this doesn’t work anymore and your NVMe install could become unbootable, until a new initramfs is created, e.g., while booting a rescue system from the SD card.
  • wpa_supplicant 2.11 is broken on the PBP’s brcm 43456 and lead to Wifi unable to connect. Attempting to rebing the Wifi can lead to a hardcrash (including data loss, potentially corrupting the root device making the device temporarily unbootable until the filesystem is fixed – e.g. fsck.ext4’d or btrfs rescue clear-logd ), one need to downgrade back to 2.10 to restore functionning Wifi.
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No Wi-Fi / Bluetooth on PInebook Pro with kernels > 6.9.3-3
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That issue has been around for months. The fix is this for the new wpa_supplicant:

/etc/modprobe.d/brcmfmac.conf:

options brcmfmac feature_disable=0x200000
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First thank you very much for pointing me to this fix: I’ve had until now only seen the “downgrade to 2.10” fix wherever I’ve looked.

(either my search-fu is lacking, or Google and Bing (powering DuckDuckGo) do bury this answer several pages in, with the hopes of printing more ads – jokes on them ads are blocked)

Sadly, after testing, wpa_supplicant 2.11 is still unable to connect even with that driver options activated. I didn’t if rebinding leads to data-losing hardcrash, though.

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Hello,
Weird enough, I’ve been using wpa_supplicant 2.11-3 on my PBP and it works, without the modprobe brcmfmac feature fix…

Thanks for the excellent nvme hint though, I didn’t realize my nvme script wasn’t working anymore…