Information: Over the last few months we have seen an uptick in wireless problems...
morrownr opened this issue · comments
I monitor the linux-wireless list where wireless development and communication takes place. Over the last year I have seen a tremendous uptick in the patches adding WiFi 7 support, both drivers and the supporting stack. It seems that problems have increased over the last 6 months. There seem to be more problems where it is hard to determine whether it is a driver problem or stack problem or something that would appear to be unrelated.
Yesterday, I saw the below PR go through and all I could say is... saw that coming and there is likely much more to come:
wireless fixes for v6.10-rc3
The first fixes for v6.10. And we have a big one, I suspect the
biggest wireless pull request we ever had. There are fixes all over,
both in stack and drivers. Likely the most important here are mt76 not
working on mt7615 devices, ath11k not being able to connect to 6 GHz
networks and rtlwifi suffering from packet loss. But of course there's
much more.
The reason I am posting this message is to make everyone aware of the challenges that are going on right now and ask for understanding. A vast amount of work continues to go into driver work and stack work and this is very complicated stuff so bugs are going to show up and may even impact old drivers and firmware. The devs and leadership have been under pressure for too long as WiFi 7 following closely on the heels of WiFi 6 and other updates such as WPA3 have led to elevated levels of work that have taken a toll.
If you experience a problem after a recent kernel upgrade and this is a production system or other system that needs to be reliable, go back to your previous kernel that worked well and wait for time to pass. Be hesitant to upgrade production systems that are working well. Things will get better but it will take time.
Regards,
There have been massive changes in the mac80211 stack impacting all(!) device drivers:
https://msgid.link/20240129194108.6d0ead50f5cf.I60d093b2fc81ca1853925a4d0ac3a2337d5baa5b@changeid
If not, they will not work any longer and they have to be patched (e.g.: mt7615):
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240528142308.3f7db1821e68.I531135d7ad76331a50244d6d5288e14aa9668390@changeid/
Unfortunately the changes in the mac80211 stack broke monitor mode:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218884
If you need monitor mode, I do not recommend to update to kernel 6.9.x as long as it does not receive a fix.
Things will get better but it will take time and it will need your cooperation. If you experience a problem after a recent kernel upgrade, I recommend to report it to: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/
The more reports (or confirmations of a bug), the earlier we will receive a fix.