Hello! I am having some issues where my wifi continually disconnects and reconnects. From looking at the system journal, it looks like my device is roaming back and forth between two access points and failing to authenticate. It may also be some DHCP issue. This causes gaps in network connectivity. This was not an issue prior to the update. I have an Inspiron 5515 with an Intel AX200 wifi card. Interestingly, after some research, I disabled IPv6 on the wifi connection and the problem went away for a while but is now back.
OS: Manjaro 21.2.3
Kernel: x86_64 5.16.5-1-MANJARO
DE: Plasma 5.23.5
I did update to 21.2.3 and the 5.16 kernel at the same time and haven’t done any messing with that yet. I wanted to see if there was any community knowledge before I started really messing around with trying to fix it. Thanks!
No, I haven’t tried another kernel, as I wanted to preserve the failing state in case there was meaningful information to retrieve. I’m trying to solve the problem moving forward not pinning myself to a specific kernel.
While I understand perfectly, using an LTS kernel might be the only thing that works. LTS stand for Long Term Support, so contains more bugfixes than others. Therefore, it might contain newer, updated drivers for the card that a normal kernel doesn’t.
I have seen many problems with this specific adapter, and while I can’t remember the exact solution, I think it was using a different kernel.
Edit:
This page on the Archwiki had this to say about the Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200:
For models with the Intel AX200 Wi-Fi adapter, the interface can engage in power saving when running on battery which increases network latency.
I also have this wifi card and I also had problem with disconnecting (not very often, only from time to time). You can disable mac address randomization (or set one by hand as I did), that helped me:
As a note, I’m a software engineer who deals with embedded linux systems, I know what LTS stands for. My first thought was to try the 5.15 LTS if not for the reason previously stated. I appreciate the community’s (read: your) help.
Thanks for the link. I suppose it could be powersave although the problem happens randomly and while I’m actively using the network interface. Also, I believe this has occurred while connected to mains power. But I’ll give it a shot and see what happens. It’s hard to prove a negative but I’ll report back if anything interesting happens (or doesn’t happen?).
Thanks for chiming in. Interestingly, that thread is where I got the idea to disable IPv6. I don’t have MAC randomization enabled so nothing to disable.
I might be wrong about this, but AFAIK the powsersave setting changes the adapter’s behavior both on battery power as well as when using mains, so night still be worth looking into.
As an update, downgrading to 5.15 LTS does not address this issue. Regardless of kernel version, it seems to be fine until I hibernate and then resume.
Forcing power save mode off for the wifi seems to have addressed this, at least while running 5.15 LTS. Interesting that it didn’t happen prior to recent updates. I’ll update to 5.16 again and see if maintaining that setting still fixes the problem.
The specific fix was to put:
# never power save wifi, the chip will disconnect from the network randomly on 5GHz
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="net", KERNEL=="wl*", RUN+="/usr/bin/iw dev $name set power_save off"
in /etc/udev/rules.d/81-wifi-powersave.rules as suggested by the link @Mirdarthos posted. Thanks @Mirdarthos !