Mageia forum

Hi all,

This is more of a complain ...

I have had problems with an intermittent wifi connection on Linux for a long time. No matter if I use Mageia or another distribution, this laptop or a few other ones, this network or some other, wifi intermittently drops out and restart, the number of listed networks available varies from tens to zero.

I've checked the driver used in this (up to date) mageia 7 I use and it seems to be the proper one for my chipset.

So, why my cell phone (and the windows 10) doesn't seem to drop the wifi as often as linux distros I've tried?

It would be really great if someone else know how to overcome this apparently rather widespread problem. Hope it isn't a linux driver problem since it seems the driver used in my case is provided by the chip manufacturer itself.

The only thing it seems consistently correlated to the problem is the wifi signal level, although cell phones and windows seems to manage this where linux doesn't.

Thanks

Hi

I have the same wifi device and it requires the proprietary drivers to work.
you will need to install:

broadcom-wl-common
dkms-broadcom-wl
kernel-*desktop*-devel-latest (I have the *desktop* kernel, you may have a different one. : server, i586, linus, tmb etc)

you can install from MCC- add software, or from a root terminal (urpmi )
any extra packages / dependencies should be installed automatically

you will need to reboot

regards

benmc wrote:I have the same wifi device

How do you know what wifi device the OP is currently using ?

doktor5000 wrote:How do you know what wifi device the OP is currently using ?

good question.

It appears my reply was for this thread: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=13327

Thank you, Bemmc,

But unfortunately it seems I'm already using the right driver:

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$ lspci| grep -i wireless
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless-AC 9560 [Jefferson Peak] (rev 10)

and,

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$ rpm -qa|grep iwl
iwlwifi-4965-ucode-228.61.2.24-11.mga7.nonfree
iwlwifi-3945-ucode-15.32.2.9-9.mga7.nonfree
iwlwifi-firmware-20191220-1.mga7.nonfree

assuming that

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iwlwifi-firmware-20191220-1.mga7.nonfree

is an update of

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20190114-2

, the link,

https://packages.debian.org/buster/firmware-iwlwifi

says it covers the 9560 intel chip.

Please post the output of

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lspcidrake -v|grep -i net

to show vendor/product ID for your wireless chipset

Doktor5000, here is the output of this command:

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$ lspcidrake -v|grep  -i net
r8169           : Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.|RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [NETWORK_ETHERNET] (vendor:10ec device:8168 subv:1d05 subd:1042) (rev: 12)
iwlwifi         : Intel Corporation|Wireless-AC 9560 [Jefferson Peak] [NETWORK_OTHER] (vendor:8086 device:a370 subv:8086 subd:0034) (rev: 10)

I thank any hint on this

But not only mine isn't the only computer with problems but also I've seen some other posts, in other forums, other distros, reporting similar experience...

Please add some more information on your actual wireless connection and router.
Are you connected via 2.4GHz or 5GHz band? What channel is selected on the router, or is it set to auto-select. What wifi router are you using, and what encryption?
Something that might help is manually selecting a channel, and using 5GHz only, see the link: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/use ... form_noise
Also try the other way around if you're currently using 5GHz.

Then one by one, try disabling hardware encryption (switch to software encryption), power management, bluetooth coexistence and possibly other module options.
You can view available module options and their settings by doing as root

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modinfo iwlwifi|grep parm:

See some pointers e.g. here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ne ... ss#iwlwifi and here https://blog.kafaiworks.com/posts/archl ... -msi-gp63/ or here https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/com ... y_on_wifi/

Also please at least add the output as root of

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journalctl -ab|grep -iE "iwlwifi|80211"

so we can see what the iwlwifi module reports to the system log.

Hi Doktor5000,

The router is an old TP-Link TL-WR941ND, 2.4 to 2.4835 GHz.
The channel is on automatic. It is possible to set 20MHz for the channel in the router's configuration, I did it now to try. I also set the channel as 9.

I'm also posting the output of modinfo and journalctl attached.

The other attachment:

For the journalctl output, has there been any disconnect or other connection issue during the time in the log?

doktor5000 wrote:For the journalctl output, has there been any disconnect or other connection issue during the time in the log?

Not that I could notice.

Well, you would need to post a log excerpt where you actually had connection issues, and you would need to add some comments on when the connection issues took place.

Otherwise there's not much more that can be advised remotely ...

Shouldn't this be marked Solved?

Is it?

@canadaist: Why do you think so ? OP never mentioned that the issue is fixed, and from what I understood the connection issues still happen intermittently.

doktor5000 wrote:and from what I understood the connection issues still happen intermittently.

Yes, connection is still intermittent here. I've made the channel set to 9 and choose 20MHz but no luck.

Maybe I should buy a better rooter ...

Sorry, I guess I misinterpreted this...

,

has there been any disconnect or other connection issue during the time in the log?

Not that I could notice

Hoping someone can help me,
I've attached the output of dmesg in a moment when wifi kept going down and up so often as a few seconds...
There one can see "Connection to AP AP 64:66:b3:73:bd:ae lost" many times. Also it is possible to see it gets reconnected a few seconds after ...

Thanks in advance

Which of the suggestions did you test out yet?

doktor5000 wrote:Then one by one, try disabling hardware encryption (switch to software encryption), power management, bluetooth coexistence and possibly other module options.
You can view available module options and their settings by doing as root

Code: Select all

modinfo iwlwifi|grep parm:

See some pointers e.g. here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ne ... ss#iwlwifi and here https://blog.kafaiworks.com/posts/archl ... -msi-gp63/ or here https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/com ... y_on_wifi/

If you use networkmanager, you could also try the suggestion from https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1599036#c10 to disable PMF.

doktor5000 wrote:Then one by one, try disabling hardware encryption (switch to software encryption), power management, bluetooth coexistence and possibly other module options.

Setting software encryption results in no connection at all, changing power management (via power_save), and bluetooth coexistence didn't help;

Changing other parameters will be (as the three above) blind tests since I really don't know what I'm doing. I'll try one by one, but If parameters are to be set in different combinations then the number of tests will be really large ...

Someone, in another forum, changed /etc/sysctl.conf to have the following lines

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

and reported the problem was solved. It did not help me also.
By the way, should /etc/sysctl.conf have those lines about IPV4?

doktor5000 wrote:If you use networkmanager

I've used networkmanager in another distro => same problems.

Thanks a lot, anyway ...

adhefe wrote:By the way, should /etc/sysctl.conf have those lines about IPV4?

So you want to disable IPv4 ?

doktor5000 wrote:So you want to disable IPv4 ?

Is there any risk of any kind if I do this?

Well, you will only have IPv6 then. If your ISP doesn't offer a native IPv6 connection, you won't have any internet connection at all.