12 ms·

Linux Intel WiFi driver broken with 5&6GHz bands for longer than three years

207 points by Avamander 4y ago

Arnavion 4y ago
>looks like lar_disable functionality was removed as of 5.5 kernel as a way to fix the firmware crash issue with iwlwifi, is that right? >[...] i've tried replacing the wifi adapter but this happens on intel wireless-ac 3165, 8265, and 9260 dual band 160Mhz (currently installed adapter). >[...] On Intel ax210ngw all 5ghz channels are disabled and cannot be used to transmit So it's iwlwifi specifically. >i should add that this happens on both windows and linux but at least on linux i had a way of disabling LAR so my regulatory domain gets detected properly and all the wifi channels/widths works as they should. >[...] on all 5.3 and earlier kernels, using lar_disable=1 all my channels work and i get a full 1733mbps link speed (5ghz ch.36 at 160mhz)as shown here So it's not a Linux-specific issue. Rather it seems to be buggy firmware, and a method that OP was relying on to work around that bug was disabled because it was causing other issues with said buggy firmware.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  Is there a patch for the kernel 6 line to add back the lar_disable functionality?
  - stefan_ 4y ago
    This was the patch that removed it: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f06021a18fcf8d8a1e79c5e0a8ec4eb2b038e153 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f06021a18fcf8d8a1e7... But this commit message is burying the lede a bit. There are two problems here: 1) you can revert the change, but a large part of the regulatory logic lives in the firmware blob running on the chip and you can not change this. 2) the FCC doesn't look kindly upon functionality that ignores regulatory limits being available to end customers. It was already not legal for Intel to add this in the first place, and they certainly won't help you reinstate it. The second part might be why these devices have been in a "broken" regulatory state forever now where they stay away from everything that touches upon e.g. DFS; someone at Intel might have realized that letting users pick their regulatory region is already not something they should be offering. The reality is that these WiFi chips should probably have some fuse in them that decides what regulatory region they were made for and then run off that, but you can see the business people losing their mind over that: now you need to have a hundred different SKUs and worse you need to understand your distribution chain. So a software setting it is, and then you see why the FCC is upset.
    - mjevans 4y ago
      But what if someone moves or simply uses hardware in a different region that's sold? What if the laws change? The correct 'work around' is to build a kernel with a DEFAULT regulatory domain, abstract from any vendor's specific implementation, allow that domain to be updated at runtime (particularly for mobile devices), and follow the laws there in. I also advocate (in this post) for wifi_regulations=BREAKTHELAWANDDISABLE (allcaps required) to completely bypass filtering channels. This would be useful in some situations such as isolated testing environments, use in International Waters, and any other environment that's isolated enough.
      - jodrellblank 4y ago
        If you aren't breaking any laws transmitting like that in International Waters, why call it BREAKTHELAW and call out that use case? If you are breaking laws transmitting like that in International Waters, why would this setting be called out as specifically useful in International Waters? Neither seems to make sense. (And does this come from the Microsoft team who came up with setup.exe /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms_DiagnosticDataOFF ?)
        mjevans 4y ago
        It doesn't make sense to call the same option multiple things for such a small number of use cases; you really want the last thing, but someone might not know that in _many_ circumstances it could be against the law to use it, hence the prefix to document that. Edit: ALSO, in case it wasn't clear... E.G. wifi_regulations=USA or wifi_regulations=CDN or wifi_regulations=GBR or some other set of country codes / match in the table of known regulations. A longer string that manually specifies allowed frequencies in some way might also work.
      - stefan_ 4y ago
        Keep in mind that for stations only (e.g. mobile devices most of the time), the rules are relaxed: if the station sees an AP operating on some channel, it is allowed to assume that it can operate on that channel. And of course passively scanning a channel to check for the presence of an AP is not transmitting, so no regulatory problem there. But don't worry, for 6 GHz the FCC has come up with even more insane stuff: if you want to unlock more channels and power, your AP will have to (1) geolocate itself and (2) contact a central server to determine regulatory restrictions for that location. They are calling this Automatic Frequency Coordination (AFC). See page 13 of https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363490A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363490A1.pdf: > We will require the AFC to use a centralized model where each standard-power access point remotely accesses an AFC to obtain a list of available frequency ranges in which it is permitted to operate and the maximum permissible power in each frequency range
villgax 4y ago
On a Ryzen 5 3600 desktop with two nvme drives running windows 10 & Ubuntu 22 unaware of each other it is 50-50 odd of either Bluetooth or WiFi not detected until a few reboots
- LamaOfRuin 4y ago
  Windows regularly puts and leaves radios in various low-power states that linux doesn't know about, so I generally need to cleanly shut down windows completely before booting into linux.
  - cf100clunk 4y ago
    I posted this solution elsewhere recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35113567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35113567 I think it is what you've been seeing.
    - villgax 4y ago
      Thx I'll check it out!
mydriasis 4y ago
I knew something was up. Goofy problems with wireless abound for a _long time_ with seemingly no solution.
- cf100clunk 4y ago
  I leave wavemon running in a terminal just for sport these days to see what my ax200 and ax210 are doing. It is always a mysterious surprise to see what rx and tx values might be seen at any given time.
- favaq 4y ago
  "Goofy problems [...] abound for a _long time_ with seemingly no solution" is the norm in desktop Linux.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > "Goofy problems [...] abound for a _long time_ with seemingly no solution" is the norm in desktop Linux. Hey, it's still better than Windows:) To quote a bit from upthread, >>i should add that this happens on both windows and linux but at least on linux i had a way of disabling LAR so my regulatory domain gets detected properly and all the wifi channels/widths works as they should. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35199660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35199660)
    - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
      Had, not has. That option no longer exists.
  - oynqr 4y ago
    I remember trying to find a USB wifi adapter that actually has WPA3 driver support on Windows. Hell.
  - mydriasis 4y ago
    Not really. Desktop Linux destroys every other user experience I've had without trying.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Ironically, I run a machine with a Realtek Wifi 6 chip and it works great on Linux, despite everything I read online was that Realtek is to be avoided on Linux and Intel should be the go-to. In a similar fashion, I was also luckier with Nvidia proprietary drivers on Linux than with AMD open source drivers. Seems like HW on Linux really is a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.
- cf100clunk 4y ago
  Could you please give the dmesg and/or other relevant id for your Realtek device? I'm getting tired of these Intel ax2?0 issues. I'm not much of a Bluetooth user but does it also work well?
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    I'm currently logged into Windoze for some work but I can tell you the card is a Realtek RTL8852AE. I can pull up the dmesg info later tonight when I reboot into linux if you want. Bluetooth works fine on it on Linux as well between my phone and my Sony headphones. No complaints from me on Fedora/Opensuse. Out of curiosity, what issues are you having with the Intel AX chip? I also have it on my Lenovo Intel work machine running Ubuntu 22.04 and it seems OK to me.
    - cf100clunk 4y ago
      > RTL8852AE No that's fine, great info, cheers.
    - Vogtinator 4y ago
      Same RTL chip here, works absolutely fine without any issues.
- ajoseps 4y ago
  do you by chance have any experience with the realtek ethernet? I too have seen the conventional wisdom around avoiding the realtek chips. I'm looking to build a linux box (hopefully) soon and filtering out mobos with realtek chips is difficult
lelandbatey 4y ago
The link seems to be experiencing a mysterious outage, reporting "404" when I visit the page. Other bugs seem to be fine. Not sure what's going on. Here's a mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20230317164517/https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206469 https://web.archive.org/web/20230317164517/https://bugzilla....
- mricon 4y ago
  The admins probably got grumpy because a bajilion HN bots querying for link previews DDOS'ed the whole bugzilla.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- nousermane 4y ago
  Hug of death from HN visitors. For fellow website admins, this is your regular reminder to use static site generators, where possible, and server-side cache where not.
  - berkle4455 4y ago
    I’d argue SSG and caching are the same solution just a difference in where the cache resides (disk vs memory) and warming strategy (on-demand vs preemptive)
    - throwaway81523 4y ago
      How often does a bug tracker get that much traffic? And using an SSG for one when tons of the queries will have specific filtering terms doesn't seem so great either.
      - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        Bugzilla routinely falls on its knees just from internal use.
amiga-workbench 4y ago
I'm so relieved to find that its not just me going crazy all this time. Its gotten so bad that I've had to install a bloody MediaTek WiFi card in my ThinkPad just to make it work reliably. I remember when the 8000 series radios were the gold standard for mobile wireless, all the newer AX cards have been nothing but pain and suffering.
- eikenberry 4y ago
  And Intel was the last reliable wifi chip maker I knew. What are good, well supported (on linux) wifi chipsets these days?
  - amiga-workbench 4y ago
    I can only speak for myself here, but I'm running a MediaTek MT7921 on Fedora 37, I picked it up on eBay for £12 and its been spot on. Unlike my Intel AX210 I can actually get a full gigabit down sat next to my router.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - wtallis 4y ago
    Try anything that's well-supported by OpenWRT. Even if you don't need support for AP mode, using a chip+driver pair that meets that standard (i.e. has mature AP mode support from an open-source driver that works on multiple architectures) usually means the client mode is also fully-supported (though maybe not Bluetooth). For 802.11ac, that generally means Qualcomm-Atheros ath10k or Mediately mt76 devices, with the latter being more popular among OEMs for use in client devices.
    - eptcyka 4y ago
      Is there anything that's current and supported by OpenWRT? Whilst I love OpenWRT, it's support is more on the level of it works enough to tx/rx packets and not necessarily all of the hardware functionality is enabled and works as per the specification.
kennethrc 4y ago
It appears this is a non-US issue? "iw reg get" shows "country 00: DFS-UNSET" with 9 frequencies (incl. 755-928 MHz ... huh) and "country US: DFS-UNSET" with a long list going from 2402-7125 MHz on my Wi-Fi 6E AX211
- bscphil 4y ago
  I was confused by this too. 5 GHz channels with 40/80 MHz width definitely work for me, without having to set a regulatory domain. It appears that this problem is related to Intel's WiFi firmware automatic detection of the regulatory domain, which is LAR. This is done on the basis of nearby access points, although the specifics of how this works is beyond me. The problem is that if this gets detected incorrectly, there's no way to override. What the users in this bug report found that attempting to set the regulatory domain manually resulted in two separate regulatory domains being defined, which still left the 5 GHz channels disabled on their devices. A workaround for this firmware issue, previously, was to disable LAR, which would force the card to use the manually set regulatory domain. But this option was removed from the kernel due to it causing other problems. So I don't think this is (exclusively) a non-US issue, it's an issue for people who live in a place where nearby access points will teach the WiFi driver the wrong regulatory domain ... however that works. It's probably less common for this to happen in the US, but not impossible. Partially contrary to the title, I would expect this problem to affect a relatively small number of users. Edit: I found a great blog post talking about the issue in more detail, although it's from the point of view of hosting an AP on the device. https://tildearrow.org/?p=post&month=7&year=2022&item=lar https://tildearrow.org/?p=post&month=7&year=2022&item=lar
  - stametseater 4y ago
    > So I don't think this is a non-US issue, it's an issue for people who live in a place where nearby access points will teach the WiFi driver the wrong regulatory domain ... however that works. It's probably less common for this to happen in the US, but not impossible. Could it be as simple as somebody moving from Indonesia or wherever to America, and bringing their Indonesian/etc AP with them?
sadlywebdev 4y ago
A friend of mine had intermitent WiFi issues for a long time. One WiFi they could just never even find, until we figured out the Intel WiFi driver for their WiFi-Chipset contained a bug causing 2ghz WiFis on channel 13 to not be visible. It is a tiring process to identify issues like this in drivers. Really sucks when manufacturers just do not test their software.
- MayeulC 4y ago
  Sounds like a misconfigured regulatory zone, TBH. Channels 12 and 13 are not legally usable in every country, including the USA: https://www.howtogeek.com/402142/why-wi-fi-channels-12-13-and-14-are-illegal-in-the-usa/ https://www.howtogeek.com/402142/why-wi-fi-channels-12-13-an...
- wil421 4y ago
  That’s a feature for outdoor radios so they don’t interfere with airplane radars. Not sure why it was in a laptop. As the other poster said it’s for some non-US countries. My APs have an outdoor mode I was curious about and turns out it’s for plane radars. I was very confused when I turned it on. They were outside APs so I turned it on. I was looking at the channel interfaces and noticed missing channels.
- antisthenes 4y ago
  > WiFi-Chipset contained a bug causing 2ghz WiFis on channel 13 to not be visible. Don't use non-standard channels. You're making it worse for everyone.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Channels 12+ are perfectly valid for WiFi use in some jurisdictions. In fact, they're useful exactly because they mostly transmit outside the range of normal WiFi channels. 802.11n works perfectly fine with channels 1+5+9+13, letting the guard bands intersect. The 1/6/11 set common to the USA leaves plenty of guard space to prevent overlaps, but wastes bandwidth in jurisdictions where channel 12 and 13 are disallowed.
hackernudes 4y ago
This is for 5ghz AP (access point) mode. As a station/client it works fine. A workaround here https://tildearrow.org/?p=post&month=7&year=2022&item=lar https://tildearrow.org/?p=post&month=7&year=2022&item=lar
- phoronixrly 4y ago
  What insane lengths are people prepared to go to to work around this issue, and still... > since it does not disable LAR at all, it inherits the issue of requiring a 5GHz access point to be active and near the card in order to detect a 5GHz-able country.
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - sofixa 4y ago
      Macs are not a replacement for a Linux desktop, laptop or a server. They do not provide the same options nor allow you do the same things. There is some overlap, but same as you wouldn't use a Linux desktop to run the Adobe suite, Macs are poorly suited for servers, development, power users, etc. - outside of the Apple ecosystem of course, because it's literally the only choice. For anything else, any recent Linux distro provides better tools and better UX, so why bother with Apple's ecosystem, lack of package manager that doesn't suck, compatibility issues left and right (can you run a VM on M Macs now? Kind of, sometimes, depends on how much you pay to whom; containers are still a pain), an undebuggable and uncustomisable OS, etc. etc.
      - culturestate 4y ago
        > Macs are poorly suited for … development, power users… Am I misunderstanding you or does this not describe the vast majority of Mac users in Silicon Valley?
        4y ago
narutowindy 4y ago
To be honest, I bought a new laptop when AX 5GHz releaded and installed my own Linux work setup. Boom wifi interl disconnects every 5-10min on 5Ghz. I had reconnect manually because do some issues with drivers. With the total pain I moved to windows setup. It's unbelievable that such a premium products breaks on major operating systems.
smallerfish 4y ago
Not related to wifi, but Intel broke the IPU6 webcam on Linux also. I have a Dell XPS13 - on the initial Ubuntu they shipped with, it was working, but after a dist-upgrade it stopped. There's lots of traffic out there, with some reports that it started working again with the 6.1 kernel, but on mine (with Dell drivers and 6.2 kernel) it's broken. There was another Intel related issue with this laptop also; the gpu would freeze/panic intermittently, multiple times a day. This was "fixed" by adding a boot flag in grub to turn off a certain feature, and I think the ultimate fix may be working its way into the kernel currently. Really not the slick experience I was hoping for with the XPS13. I mostly work on my desktop so it's not the end of the world, but it has me thinking about getting a mac in 5 or so years, assuming Asahi reaches stability.
- stametseater 4y ago
  > There was another Intel related issue with this laptop also; the gpu would freeze/panic intermittently, multiple times a day. I had this on my Dell XPS13 (9310) as well, although in my case it was a few times a week, maybe .5 times a day. It also seemed to almost always trigger when kwin was animating something, particularly switching to another virtual desktop, but never when playing any games. I can't imagine why, but the problem mostly went away when I turned off all animations in kwin, and seems to have gone away completely sometime about a year or so ago. All in all, it's still a better experience than the Macbook Air I was using prior to having this XPS13... That damn Macbook loved to vomit onto the screen and lock up without warning. No dust, thermals seemed fine, battery was healthy... no clue what was wrong with it. And without many exposed settings to fiddle with.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Chromebooks are the only laptops you can usually expect to work correctly and integrate every peripheral with Linux. Which, no surprise, is why IPU6 cameras work on Chromebooks. It's open source and everything. https://source.chromium.org/chromiumos/chromiumos/codesearch/+/main:src/platform/camera/hal/intel/ipu6/aal/ https://source.chromium.org/chromiumos/chromiumos/codesearch... The reason these things are often broken on Ubuntu and the other distros is simply that the governance and organization of those projects is not incentivized to ship a working product.
StrangeATractor 4y ago
Ahh, that's about the time IIRC that Dell started soldering in their wireless chips on the XPS 13. Previously you could swap them out for a different chip with better drivers, now you're stuck.
- CameronNemo 4y ago
  Embarrassing decision. All in the pursuit of a slightly thinner chassis, I imagine.
  - ac29 4y ago
    My guess is they are using Intel CNVi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi), which moves some of the WiFi/Bluetooth hardware into the CPU/Chipset. It saves money.
    - CameronNemo 4y ago
      What do you mean by saves money? Couldn't Intel be using shenanigans (i.e. anticompetitive price incentives) to get device makers to use this type of card, so the device makers are then tied to Intel wifi and can't switch without redesigning their motherboard?
nubinetwork 4y ago
My ath9k stopped working after upgrading from 5.4.x to 5.15.x... 5ghz radios disabled, couldnt turn them on no matter what I tried. I figured it was because hostapd screwed something up... I wonder if it was the same (or similar) issue... I wound up buying a mikrotik AP after all that nonsense.
unxdfa 4y ago
I’m convinced the only thing Wi-Fi doesn’t fuck out on at the moment is windows. Had problems with Linux, macs and android for the last few years. Just works on windows! Shame about all the other problems with it.
- PeppeX 4y ago
  Hi, I speak as a Windows user, these cards still do not work! No fixes have been released!
  - PeppeX 4y ago
    I tried installing Zorin Os as I hoped the problem would go away, but it still persists.I have an Intel Ax201 on Asus Rog Strix G712LW
ranger_danger 4y ago
my laptop's bluetooth has been broken under linux ever since it was released in 2015: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99371 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99371
miiiiiike 4y ago
This frustrated me for over a year. I moved to a house and wanted to give my gf a reprieve from the wires I used to run through our apartments. But, I’ve been dealing with connection drops and speeds of around 1.2 Mbps. I figured it was the walls until I setup a “slow” 2G network for an old printer and my PC was at full speed when connected to it. Figured out that it was a driver issue a few weeks ago. This is a problem I haven’t had since around 2000. Never would have guessed that the device I chose for compatibility and support would have a driver that flakey.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  This specific bug mostly impacts AP mode. If you can get a connection over 5+GHz at all, you're probably dealing with a different driver issue.
boppo1 4y ago
Ouch, I just bought a gigabyte b650 because reddit told me the intel wifi would play nicer with ubuntu than a realtek card. I don't know who to believe anymore.
- the_pwner224 4y ago
  This bug is for using the Intel card as a WiFi access point. For using it as a WiFi client, Intel cards still "just work," and there aren't any other good WiFi options afaik. Realtek and Broadcom do suck. Atheros used to be good a long time ago with ath9k, but I don't think they're really around anymore (?).
  - Avamander 4y ago
    I'm relatively certain that the regulatory locale non/misdetection will affect station mode (power) limits as well, people will probably just notice that less often (as the main hindrance to ap mode is the "no IR" flags).
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  In my experience, the Intel WiFi drivers work fine, unless you want to set up an access point. Still kind of crappy, but my experience with Broadcom is so bad that I'd rather lack the 160MHz channels (and use 80MHz) than try to get Broadcom's drivers to work right.
rektide 4y ago
5 week old issue. Ed: oops, 3 year old!! (what year is it?) No useful updates. Generally I think Intel is one of the best companies at open-source by far & it's a huge competitive advantage. But all companies of any notable size are companies of many smaller orgs... Still surprising, as Intel has excellent dedication to wifi & has great works like connman. But also... competitive advantages only matter if anyone notices or cares. This issue is incredible egg-in-the-face to literally all of us. That everyone missed this is absurd! Ed: now that I see the full year, pretty shameful seemingly nothing has been done in 3 years. Why?!? Ed ed: oh, only affects AP mode... OK now that's not good but way more reasonable scope!!
- loeg 4y ago
  > 5 week old issue The link I'm looking at says 2020-02-08.
- prerok 4y ago
  5 weeks? It's actually 3 years.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Thanks! Apologies. Thanks thanks thanks. I edited the post after your posting. Thanks thanks thanks. I also didn't know at the time this was limited to AP mode. Still, it being bad for so long is ultra-embarassing. I sincerely appreciate the correction. My bad.
pxc 4y ago
Intel sometimes gets a lot of credit from desktop Linux users for having open-source drivers, but I don't get it. Their drivers are bad, at least when it comes to graphics and WiFi. Tearing problems, graphical artifacts, and connections dropping out have all been problems I've had with Intel as long as I can remember. I haven't had a laptop that came with an Atheros chipset in a while, so I don't know if the buyout by Qualcomm has spoiled anything, but Atheros always had way better WiFi support on Linux than Intel did. And similarly, a recent AMD GPU with the community drivers in Mesa has given me way better stability than anything Intel has put out. Open-source drivers are nice, but good open-source drivers are worth a lot more. Go for AMD or Atheros where you can. (That said, I've had unproblematic experiences with a lot of other kinds of Intel hardware on Linux, like SSDs, wired NICs, NUCs, and even Thunderbolt. And for the most part, WiFi has been more or less good enough for me with Intel in the past few years that I haven't bothered to replace Intel WiFi cards when they've come included in my laptops.)
- stametseater 4y ago
  In my experience, tearing only occurs with Intel GPUs if you're using X without a compositor. With a compositor it isn't an issue.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Compositors still have issues in some setups (mine, specifically: Intel + Nvidia + mux chip). On most Linux laptops with no dedicated GPU, Intel GPUs seem to work fine, though.
    - stametseater 4y ago
      Ah I see, I have no experience with dual-GPU setups.
      - jeroenhd 4y ago
        Before this laptop, I used an Intel+AMD laptop which worked fine (except for AMD's driver messing up in suspend, because the architecture was uncommon and left behind in the middle of a driver model switch). "Avoid Nvidia; if you have to use Nvidia, avoid other brands if possible" seems to be the way to go. I'm still mad about Nvidia setting an arbitrary limit to the amount of X11 displays. There is no good reason for it other than locking their customers into data center GPUs.
paines 4y ago
I have this reproducible issue on an XPS 7590(using a Killer 1650) that when I do somehting GPU heavy, e.g. gaming, the Wifi connection will get super flaky and then stop completley. DMESG is flooded with error messages regarding wifi. I only realized this, that the Steam client has a little notification which would tell you that you went offline. I started to experiment and it works for me if I disable the 11n standard. The driver has an option to do so (modprobe -r iwlwifi && modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1). Only then I can play games and have an internet connection... I am pretty sure that if this would happen on Windows, all the users would have gone balastic.

207 points by Avamander 4y ago

>looks like lar_disable functionality was removed as of 5.5 kernel as a way to fix the firmware crash issue with iwlwifi, is that right? >[...] i've tried replacing the wifi adapter but this happens on intel wireless-ac 3165, 8265, and 9260 dual band 160Mhz (currently installed adapter). >[...] On Intel ax210ngw all 5ghz channels are disabled and cannot be used to transmit So it's iwlwifi specifically. >i should add that this happens on both windows and linux but at least on linux i had a way of disabling LAR so my regulatory domain gets detected properly and all the wifi channels/widths works as they should. >[...] on all 5.3 and earlier kernels, using lar_disable=1 all my channels work and i get a full 1733mbps link speed (5ghz ch.36 at 160mhz)as shown here So it's not a Linux-specific issue. Rather it seems to be buggy firmware, and a method that OP was relying on to work around that bug was disabled because it was causing other issues with said buggy firmware.

csdvrx 4y ago
Is there a patch for the kernel 6 line to add back the lar_disable functionality?
- stefan_ 4y ago
  This was the patch that removed it: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f06021a18fcf8d8a1e79c5e0a8ec4eb2b038e153 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/f06021a18fcf8d8a1e7... But this commit message is burying the lede a bit. There are two problems here: 1) you can revert the change, but a large part of the regulatory logic lives in the firmware blob running on the chip and you can not change this. 2) the FCC doesn't look kindly upon functionality that ignores regulatory limits being available to end customers. It was already not legal for Intel to add this in the first place, and they certainly won't help you reinstate it. The second part might be why these devices have been in a "broken" regulatory state forever now where they stay away from everything that touches upon e.g. DFS; someone at Intel might have realized that letting users pick their regulatory region is already not something they should be offering. The reality is that these WiFi chips should probably have some fuse in them that decides what regulatory region they were made for and then run off that, but you can see the business people losing their mind over that: now you need to have a hundred different SKUs and worse you need to understand your distribution chain. So a software setting it is, and then you see why the FCC is upset.
  - mjevans 4y ago
    But what if someone moves or simply uses hardware in a different region that's sold? What if the laws change? The correct 'work around' is to build a kernel with a DEFAULT regulatory domain, abstract from any vendor's specific implementation, allow that domain to be updated at runtime (particularly for mobile devices), and follow the laws there in. I also advocate (in this post) for wifi_regulations=BREAKTHELAWANDDISABLE (allcaps required) to completely bypass filtering channels. This would be useful in some situations such as isolated testing environments, use in International Waters, and any other environment that's isolated enough.
    - jodrellblank 4y ago
      If you aren't breaking any laws transmitting like that in International Waters, why call it BREAKTHELAW and call out that use case? If you are breaking laws transmitting like that in International Waters, why would this setting be called out as specifically useful in International Waters? Neither seems to make sense. (And does this come from the Microsoft team who came up with setup.exe /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms_DiagnosticDataOFF ?)
      - mjevans 4y ago
        It doesn't make sense to call the same option multiple things for such a small number of use cases; you really want the last thing, but someone might not know that in _many_ circumstances it could be against the law to use it, hence the prefix to document that. Edit: ALSO, in case it wasn't clear... E.G. wifi_regulations=USA or wifi_regulations=CDN or wifi_regulations=GBR or some other set of country codes / match in the table of known regulations. A longer string that manually specifies allowed frequencies in some way might also work.
    - stefan_ 4y ago
      Keep in mind that for stations only (e.g. mobile devices most of the time), the rules are relaxed: if the station sees an AP operating on some channel, it is allowed to assume that it can operate on that channel. And of course passively scanning a channel to check for the presence of an AP is not transmitting, so no regulatory problem there. But don't worry, for 6 GHz the FCC has come up with even more insane stuff: if you want to unlock more channels and power, your AP will have to (1) geolocate itself and (2) contact a central server to determine regulatory restrictions for that location. They are calling this Automatic Frequency Coordination (AFC). See page 13 of https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363490A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363490A1.pdf: > We will require the AFC to use a centralized model where each standard-power access point remotely accesses an AFC to obtain a list of available frequency ranges in which it is permitted to operate and the maximum permissible power in each frequency range

villgax 4y ago

On a Ryzen 5 3600 desktop with two nvme drives running windows 10 & Ubuntu 22 unaware of each other it is 50-50 odd of either Bluetooth or WiFi not detected until a few reboots

LamaOfRuin 4y ago
Windows regularly puts and leaves radios in various low-power states that linux doesn't know about, so I generally need to cleanly shut down windows completely before booting into linux.
- cf100clunk 4y ago
  I posted this solution elsewhere recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35113567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35113567 I think it is what you've been seeing.
  - villgax 4y ago
    Thx I'll check it out!

mydriasis 4y ago

I knew something was up. Goofy problems with wireless abound for a _long time_ with seemingly no solution.

cf100clunk 4y ago
I leave wavemon running in a terminal just for sport these days to see what my ax200 and ax210 are doing. It is always a mysterious surprise to see what rx and tx values might be seen at any given time.
favaq 4y ago
"Goofy problems [...] abound for a _long time_ with seemingly no solution" is the norm in desktop Linux.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > "Goofy problems [...] abound for a _long time_ with seemingly no solution" is the norm in desktop Linux. Hey, it's still better than Windows:) To quote a bit from upthread, >>i should add that this happens on both windows and linux but at least on linux i had a way of disabling LAR so my regulatory domain gets detected properly and all the wifi channels/widths works as they should. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35199660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35199660)
  - BenjiWiebe 4y ago
    Had, not has. That option no longer exists.
- oynqr 4y ago
  I remember trying to find a USB wifi adapter that actually has WPA3 driver support on Windows. Hell.
- mydriasis 4y ago
  Not really. Desktop Linux destroys every other user experience I've had without trying.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

Ironically, I run a machine with a Realtek Wifi 6 chip and it works great on Linux, despite everything I read online was that Realtek is to be avoided on Linux and Intel should be the go-to. In a similar fashion, I was also luckier with Nvidia proprietary drivers on Linux than with AMD open source drivers. Seems like HW on Linux really is a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.

cf100clunk 4y ago
Could you please give the dmesg and/or other relevant id for your Realtek device? I'm getting tired of these Intel ax2?0 issues. I'm not much of a Bluetooth user but does it also work well?
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  I'm currently logged into Windoze for some work but I can tell you the card is a Realtek RTL8852AE. I can pull up the dmesg info later tonight when I reboot into linux if you want. Bluetooth works fine on it on Linux as well between my phone and my Sony headphones. No complaints from me on Fedora/Opensuse. Out of curiosity, what issues are you having with the Intel AX chip? I also have it on my Lenovo Intel work machine running Ubuntu 22.04 and it seems OK to me.
  - cf100clunk 4y ago
    > RTL8852AE No that's fine, great info, cheers.
  - Vogtinator 4y ago
    Same RTL chip here, works absolutely fine without any issues.
ajoseps 4y ago
do you by chance have any experience with the realtek ethernet? I too have seen the conventional wisdom around avoiding the realtek chips. I'm looking to build a linux box (hopefully) soon and filtering out mobos with realtek chips is difficult

lelandbatey 4y ago

The link seems to be experiencing a mysterious outage, reporting "404" when I visit the page. Other bugs seem to be fine. Not sure what's going on. Here's a mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20230317164517/https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206469 https://web.archive.org/web/20230317164517/https://bugzilla....

mricon 4y ago
The admins probably got grumpy because a bajilion HN bots querying for link previews DDOS'ed the whole bugzilla.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nousermane 4y ago
Hug of death from HN visitors. For fellow website admins, this is your regular reminder to use static site generators, where possible, and server-side cache where not.
- berkle4455 4y ago
  I’d argue SSG and caching are the same solution just a difference in where the cache resides (disk vs memory) and warming strategy (on-demand vs preemptive)
  - throwaway81523 4y ago
    How often does a bug tracker get that much traffic? And using an SSG for one when tons of the queries will have specific filtering terms doesn't seem so great either.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Bugzilla routinely falls on its knees just from internal use.

amiga-workbench 4y ago

I'm so relieved to find that its not just me going crazy all this time. Its gotten so bad that I've had to install a bloody MediaTek WiFi card in my ThinkPad just to make it work reliably. I remember when the 8000 series radios were the gold standard for mobile wireless, all the newer AX cards have been nothing but pain and suffering.

eikenberry 4y ago
And Intel was the last reliable wifi chip maker I knew. What are good, well supported (on linux) wifi chipsets these days?
- amiga-workbench 4y ago
  I can only speak for myself here, but I'm running a MediaTek MT7921 on Fedora 37, I picked it up on eBay for £12 and its been spot on. Unlike my Intel AX210 I can actually get a full gigabit down sat next to my router.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- wtallis 4y ago
  Try anything that's well-supported by OpenWRT. Even if you don't need support for AP mode, using a chip+driver pair that meets that standard (i.e. has mature AP mode support from an open-source driver that works on multiple architectures) usually means the client mode is also fully-supported (though maybe not Bluetooth). For 802.11ac, that generally means Qualcomm-Atheros ath10k or Mediately mt76 devices, with the latter being more popular among OEMs for use in client devices.
  - eptcyka 4y ago
    Is there anything that's current and supported by OpenWRT? Whilst I love OpenWRT, it's support is more on the level of it works enough to tx/rx packets and not necessarily all of the hardware functionality is enabled and works as per the specification.

kennethrc 4y ago

It appears this is a non-US issue? "iw reg get" shows "country 00: DFS-UNSET" with 9 frequencies (incl. 755-928 MHz ... huh) and "country US: DFS-UNSET" with a long list going from 2402-7125 MHz on my Wi-Fi 6E AX211

bscphil 4y ago
I was confused by this too. 5 GHz channels with 40/80 MHz width definitely work for me, without having to set a regulatory domain. It appears that this problem is related to Intel's WiFi firmware automatic detection of the regulatory domain, which is LAR. This is done on the basis of nearby access points, although the specifics of how this works is beyond me. The problem is that if this gets detected incorrectly, there's no way to override. What the users in this bug report found that attempting to set the regulatory domain manually resulted in two separate regulatory domains being defined, which still left the 5 GHz channels disabled on their devices. A workaround for this firmware issue, previously, was to disable LAR, which would force the card to use the manually set regulatory domain. But this option was removed from the kernel due to it causing other problems. So I don't think this is (exclusively) a non-US issue, it's an issue for people who live in a place where nearby access points will teach the WiFi driver the wrong regulatory domain ... however that works. It's probably less common for this to happen in the US, but not impossible. Partially contrary to the title, I would expect this problem to affect a relatively small number of users. Edit: I found a great blog post talking about the issue in more detail, although it's from the point of view of hosting an AP on the device. https://tildearrow.org/?p=post&month=7&year=2022&item=lar https://tildearrow.org/?p=post&month=7&year=2022&item=lar
- stametseater 4y ago
  > So I don't think this is a non-US issue, it's an issue for people who live in a place where nearby access points will teach the WiFi driver the wrong regulatory domain ... however that works. It's probably less common for this to happen in the US, but not impossible. Could it be as simple as somebody moving from Indonesia or wherever to America, and bringing their Indonesian/etc AP with them?

sadlywebdev 4y ago

A friend of mine had intermitent WiFi issues for a long time. One WiFi they could just never even find, until we figured out the Intel WiFi driver for their WiFi-Chipset contained a bug causing 2ghz WiFis on channel 13 to not be visible. It is a tiring process to identify issues like this in drivers. Really sucks when manufacturers just do not test their software.

MayeulC 4y ago
Sounds like a misconfigured regulatory zone, TBH. Channels 12 and 13 are not legally usable in every country, including the USA: https://www.howtogeek.com/402142/why-wi-fi-channels-12-13-and-14-are-illegal-in-the-usa/ https://www.howtogeek.com/402142/why-wi-fi-channels-12-13-an...
wil421 4y ago
That’s a feature for outdoor radios so they don’t interfere with airplane radars. Not sure why it was in a laptop. As the other poster said it’s for some non-US countries. My APs have an outdoor mode I was curious about and turns out it’s for plane radars. I was very confused when I turned it on. They were outside APs so I turned it on. I was looking at the channel interfaces and noticed missing channels.
antisthenes 4y ago
> WiFi-Chipset contained a bug causing 2ghz WiFis on channel 13 to not be visible. Don't use non-standard channels. You're making it worse for everyone.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Channels 12+ are perfectly valid for WiFi use in some jurisdictions. In fact, they're useful exactly because they mostly transmit outside the range of normal WiFi channels. 802.11n works perfectly fine with channels 1+5+9+13, letting the guard bands intersect. The 1/6/11 set common to the USA leaves plenty of guard space to prevent overlaps, but wastes bandwidth in jurisdictions where channel 12 and 13 are disallowed.

hackernudes 4y ago

This is for 5ghz AP (access point) mode. As a station/client it works fine. A workaround here https://tildearrow.org/?p=post&month=7&year=2022&item=lar https://tildearrow.org/?p=post&month=7&year=2022&item=lar

phoronixrly 4y ago
What insane lengths are people prepared to go to to work around this issue, and still... > since it does not disable LAR at all, it inherits the issue of requiring a 5GHz access point to be active and near the card in order to detect a 5GHz-able country.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Macs are not a replacement for a Linux desktop, laptop or a server. They do not provide the same options nor allow you do the same things. There is some overlap, but same as you wouldn't use a Linux desktop to run the Adobe suite, Macs are poorly suited for servers, development, power users, etc. - outside of the Apple ecosystem of course, because it's literally the only choice. For anything else, any recent Linux distro provides better tools and better UX, so why bother with Apple's ecosystem, lack of package manager that doesn't suck, compatibility issues left and right (can you run a VM on M Macs now? Kind of, sometimes, depends on how much you pay to whom; containers are still a pain), an undebuggable and uncustomisable OS, etc. etc.
    - culturestate 4y ago
      > Macs are poorly suited for … development, power users… Am I misunderstanding you or does this not describe the vast majority of Mac users in Silicon Valley?
      - 4y ago

narutowindy 4y ago

To be honest, I bought a new laptop when AX 5GHz releaded and installed my own Linux work setup. Boom wifi interl disconnects every 5-10min on 5Ghz. I had reconnect manually because do some issues with drivers. With the total pain I moved to windows setup. It's unbelievable that such a premium products breaks on major operating systems.

smallerfish 4y ago

Not related to wifi, but Intel broke the IPU6 webcam on Linux also. I have a Dell XPS13 - on the initial Ubuntu they shipped with, it was working, but after a dist-upgrade it stopped. There's lots of traffic out there, with some reports that it started working again with the 6.1 kernel, but on mine (with Dell drivers and 6.2 kernel) it's broken. There was another Intel related issue with this laptop also; the gpu would freeze/panic intermittently, multiple times a day. This was "fixed" by adding a boot flag in grub to turn off a certain feature, and I think the ultimate fix may be working its way into the kernel currently. Really not the slick experience I was hoping for with the XPS13. I mostly work on my desktop so it's not the end of the world, but it has me thinking about getting a mac in 5 or so years, assuming Asahi reaches stability.

stametseater 4y ago
> There was another Intel related issue with this laptop also; the gpu would freeze/panic intermittently, multiple times a day. I had this on my Dell XPS13 (9310) as well, although in my case it was a few times a week, maybe .5 times a day. It also seemed to almost always trigger when kwin was animating something, particularly switching to another virtual desktop, but never when playing any games. I can't imagine why, but the problem mostly went away when I turned off all animations in kwin, and seems to have gone away completely sometime about a year or so ago. All in all, it's still a better experience than the Macbook Air I was using prior to having this XPS13... That damn Macbook loved to vomit onto the screen and lock up without warning. No dust, thermals seemed fine, battery was healthy... no clue what was wrong with it. And without many exposed settings to fiddle with.
jeffbee 4y ago
Chromebooks are the only laptops you can usually expect to work correctly and integrate every peripheral with Linux. Which, no surprise, is why IPU6 cameras work on Chromebooks. It's open source and everything. https://source.chromium.org/chromiumos/chromiumos/codesearch/+/main:src/platform/camera/hal/intel/ipu6/aal/ https://source.chromium.org/chromiumos/chromiumos/codesearch... The reason these things are often broken on Ubuntu and the other distros is simply that the governance and organization of those projects is not incentivized to ship a working product.

StrangeATractor 4y ago

Ahh, that's about the time IIRC that Dell started soldering in their wireless chips on the XPS 13. Previously you could swap them out for a different chip with better drivers, now you're stuck.

CameronNemo 4y ago
Embarrassing decision. All in the pursuit of a slightly thinner chassis, I imagine.
- ac29 4y ago
  My guess is they are using Intel CNVi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi), which moves some of the WiFi/Bluetooth hardware into the CPU/Chipset. It saves money.
  - CameronNemo 4y ago
    What do you mean by saves money? Couldn't Intel be using shenanigans (i.e. anticompetitive price incentives) to get device makers to use this type of card, so the device makers are then tied to Intel wifi and can't switch without redesigning their motherboard?

nubinetwork 4y ago

My ath9k stopped working after upgrading from 5.4.x to 5.15.x... 5ghz radios disabled, couldnt turn them on no matter what I tried. I figured it was because hostapd screwed something up... I wonder if it was the same (or similar) issue... I wound up buying a mikrotik AP after all that nonsense.

unxdfa 4y ago

I’m convinced the only thing Wi-Fi doesn’t fuck out on at the moment is windows. Had problems with Linux, macs and android for the last few years. Just works on windows! Shame about all the other problems with it.

PeppeX 4y ago
Hi, I speak as a Windows user, these cards still do not work! No fixes have been released!
- PeppeX 4y ago
  I tried installing Zorin Os as I hoped the problem would go away, but it still persists.I have an Intel Ax201 on Asus Rog Strix G712LW

ranger_danger 4y ago

my laptop's bluetooth has been broken under linux ever since it was released in 2015: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99371 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99371

miiiiiike 4y ago

This frustrated me for over a year. I moved to a house and wanted to give my gf a reprieve from the wires I used to run through our apartments. But, I’ve been dealing with connection drops and speeds of around 1.2 Mbps. I figured it was the walls until I setup a “slow” 2G network for an old printer and my PC was at full speed when connected to it. Figured out that it was a driver issue a few weeks ago. This is a problem I haven’t had since around 2000. Never would have guessed that the device I chose for compatibility and support would have a driver that flakey.

jeroenhd 4y ago
This specific bug mostly impacts AP mode. If you can get a connection over 5+GHz at all, you're probably dealing with a different driver issue.

boppo1 4y ago

Ouch, I just bought a gigabyte b650 because reddit told me the intel wifi would play nicer with ubuntu than a realtek card. I don't know who to believe anymore.

the_pwner224 4y ago
This bug is for using the Intel card as a WiFi access point. For using it as a WiFi client, Intel cards still "just work," and there aren't any other good WiFi options afaik. Realtek and Broadcom do suck. Atheros used to be good a long time ago with ath9k, but I don't think they're really around anymore (?).
- Avamander 4y ago
  I'm relatively certain that the regulatory locale non/misdetection will affect station mode (power) limits as well, people will probably just notice that less often (as the main hindrance to ap mode is the "no IR" flags).
jeroenhd 4y ago
In my experience, the Intel WiFi drivers work fine, unless you want to set up an access point. Still kind of crappy, but my experience with Broadcom is so bad that I'd rather lack the 160MHz channels (and use 80MHz) than try to get Broadcom's drivers to work right.

rektide 4y ago

5 week old issue. Ed: oops, 3 year old!! (what year is it?) No useful updates. Generally I think Intel is one of the best companies at open-source by far & it's a huge competitive advantage. But all companies of any notable size are companies of many smaller orgs... Still surprising, as Intel has excellent dedication to wifi & has great works like connman. But also... competitive advantages only matter if anyone notices or cares. This issue is incredible egg-in-the-face to literally all of us. That everyone missed this is absurd! Ed: now that I see the full year, pretty shameful seemingly nothing has been done in 3 years. Why?!? Ed ed: oh, only affects AP mode... OK now that's not good but way more reasonable scope!!

loeg 4y ago
> 5 week old issue The link I'm looking at says 2020-02-08.
prerok 4y ago
5 weeks? It's actually 3 years.
- rektide 4y ago
  Thanks! Apologies. Thanks thanks thanks. I edited the post after your posting. Thanks thanks thanks. I also didn't know at the time this was limited to AP mode. Still, it being bad for so long is ultra-embarassing. I sincerely appreciate the correction. My bad.

pxc 4y ago

Intel sometimes gets a lot of credit from desktop Linux users for having open-source drivers, but I don't get it. Their drivers are bad, at least when it comes to graphics and WiFi. Tearing problems, graphical artifacts, and connections dropping out have all been problems I've had with Intel as long as I can remember. I haven't had a laptop that came with an Atheros chipset in a while, so I don't know if the buyout by Qualcomm has spoiled anything, but Atheros always had way better WiFi support on Linux than Intel did. And similarly, a recent AMD GPU with the community drivers in Mesa has given me way better stability than anything Intel has put out. Open-source drivers are nice, but good open-source drivers are worth a lot more. Go for AMD or Atheros where you can. (That said, I've had unproblematic experiences with a lot of other kinds of Intel hardware on Linux, like SSDs, wired NICs, NUCs, and even Thunderbolt. And for the most part, WiFi has been more or less good enough for me with Intel in the past few years that I haven't bothered to replace Intel WiFi cards when they've come included in my laptops.)

stametseater 4y ago
In my experience, tearing only occurs with Intel GPUs if you're using X without a compositor. With a compositor it isn't an issue.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Compositors still have issues in some setups (mine, specifically: Intel + Nvidia + mux chip). On most Linux laptops with no dedicated GPU, Intel GPUs seem to work fine, though.
  - stametseater 4y ago
    Ah I see, I have no experience with dual-GPU setups.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      Before this laptop, I used an Intel+AMD laptop which worked fine (except for AMD's driver messing up in suspend, because the architecture was uncommon and left behind in the middle of a driver model switch). "Avoid Nvidia; if you have to use Nvidia, avoid other brands if possible" seems to be the way to go. I'm still mad about Nvidia setting an arbitrary limit to the amount of X11 displays. There is no good reason for it other than locking their customers into data center GPUs.

paines 4y ago

I have this reproducible issue on an XPS 7590(using a Killer 1650) that when I do somehting GPU heavy, e.g. gaming, the Wifi connection will get super flaky and then stop completley. DMESG is flooded with error messages regarding wifi. I only realized this, that the Steam client has a little notification which would tell you that you went offline. I started to experiment and it works for me if I disable the 11n standard. The driver has an option to do so (modprobe -r iwlwifi && modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1). Only then I can play games and have an internet connection... I am pretty sure that if this would happen on Windows, all the users would have gone balastic.