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WiFi frequently drops, suspected driver issue

Unix & Linux Asked on December 17, 2021

I’m running a fully up-to-date Fedora on a Macbook Pro. To get WiFi working in the first place, I installed akmods-wl as recommended. The WiFi works, but the connection keeps dropping. I’ve noticed this is especially true when there are several devices on my WiFi (when I’m the only person in the house it’s usually OK although it still drops on occasion, when roommates come in with their laptops + their phones, the drop rate increases).

When connection drops it’s usually down for 30 seconds-1 minute before reconnecting. In worst cases this happens every couple of minutes. I have another laptop running Fedora and the WiFi is fine on there, even when there are many devices in the network.

My wireless card is Broadcom BCM4331:

$ lspci | grep Broadcom
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM57765 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 10)
01:00.1 SD Host controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM57765/57785 SDXC/MMC Card Reader (rev 10)
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4331 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 02)

iwconfig on my wireless interface:

$ iwconfig wlp2s0 
wlp2s0    IEEE 802.11abg  ESSID:"WINDRUSH"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.412 GHz  Access Point: 44:E9:DD:0E:7F:00   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:off

dmesg shows lots of these two errors:

...
[11387.414926] ERROR @wl_cfg80211_get_tx_power : error (-1)
[11507.449435] ERROR @wl_dev_intvar_get : error (-1)
[11507.449440] ERROR @wl_cfg80211_get_tx_power : error (-1)
[11627.486001] ERROR @wl_dev_intvar_get : error (-1)
[11627.486008] ERROR @wl_cfg80211_get_tx_power : error (-1)
[11631.113431] ERROR @wl_dev_intvar_get : error (-1)
...

Couldn’t find any solutions for Fedora regarding this issue. Found some from Arch Wiki and Ubuntu but they didn’t work and were also dealing with different versions of the Broadcom wireless card.

(Even if no one has any clear tips for me, can someone explain what those two errors in dmesg mean?)

2 Answers

As broadcom-wifi simple owner,
suffering of similar issue (I would simply describe them as a general stability issues)
From my experience, I say it is simply the current state of their closed-source driver,
this means we (the whole community) unfortunately cannot fix those issues;
and any tentative will be temporary (until the next Linux kernel version) and partial (mostly device-specific)

Answered by mattia.b89 on December 17, 2021

Searching for "ERROR @wl_cfg80211_get_tx_power : error (-1)" gave me a whole ream of the same question, but it does seem to have a common thread... Kernel version 3.16-3.19 + Broadcom drivers:

(sorry for the links, but its hard to follow the thought-thread without them)

https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15893

leads to

https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16390

which leads to

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bcmwl/+bug/1415880

which apparently has a patch for it.

Answered by s1ns3nt on December 17, 2021

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