I’ve recently installed Gentoo on my new Framework Desktop, and for a while the network would hang, causing any program that touched the hardware to also crap out. Update same day: I’ve just had the problem recur! Agh!

Here are some symptoms:

• Thinks chug along just fine, until
• The network goes down and commands start freezing. We’re talking no C-c, no C-\, no pkill -9: just dead in the water. (I hadn’t solved switching consoles with Alt-Function keys yet, so fortunately I had tmux running.)
  • Notably, commands like emerge hang when they get to network steps. Various ip & ifconfig style commands hang immediately.
  • Commands like nmcli and ping don’t hang, but don’t work.
  • I’m pretty sure /etc/resolv.conf isn’t being touched.
• The NetworkManager daemon is running, but:
  • top shows “D” (d-sleep) and ps shows “Dsl”
  • rc-status reports NetworkManager as active, but nmcli g says its down

  • rc-service NetworkManager restart fails with

      * Caching service dependencies ... [ ok ]
      * Unmounting network filesystems ... [ ok ]
      * Stoppping NetworkManager ...
      * start-stop-daemon: 1 rocesses refused to stop [ !! ]
      * ERROR: NetworkManager failed to stop
      * Mounting network filesystems ... [ ok ]
    

  • similarly with s/restart/stop, and pkill -9 NetworkManager has no effect!
    • I didn’t understand how zap worked at the time, but it turns out not to help
    • shutting down complains about not stopping the NetworkManager, too
  • Turns out, wpa_supplicant is also in “D” status! And owned by init. Hm.
  • grep -R wpa /var/logs reminded me I needed to create /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. (I’ve done so since.)

I checked my hardware with lspci, which I’d fortunately installed during the main system installation process, and with lspci -k I found out my network card is

c0:00.0 Mediatek MT7925 (RZ717) Wi-Fi 7 160MHz [14c3:0717]

with kernel module (in use) mt7925e.

First, I tried turning off WiFi power saving as recommended by Garuda folks:

printf '%s\n' '[connection]' 'wifi.powersave = 0' | doas tee /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf

That didn’t help: a little while into my next reboot, the hang happened again. Then I tried disabling the “Active State Power Management” for my network card, which is apparently cursed with this problem:

echo 'options mt7925e disable_aspm=1' | doas tee /etc/modprobe.d/7925e_wifi.conf

That seems to have done the trick, so I’ll delete the NetworkManager settings.

Since I’ve now seen this recur, I’ve checked a few more things (added wpa_supplicant details above). I’ve also added syslog to the USE flags for NetworkManager to hopefully capture more information.

A few unrelated (?) things

I don’t have kernel logs for the problematic scenario, but now that my system is running normally I can eliminate a few things from the problem space.

In both working and non-working configurations, I saw repeated logs in dmesg for the network:

disconnect from AP <MAC> for new auth to <other MAC>
authenticate with <other MAC> (local address=<my MAC>)
send auth to <other MAC> (try 1/3)
authenticate with <other MAC> (local address=<my MAC>)
send auth to <2nd other MAC> (try 1/3)
authenticated
associate with <2nd other MAC> (try 1/3)
RX AssocResp from <2nd other MAC> (capab=0x1511 status=0 aid=3)
associated
Limiting TX power to 30 (30 - 0) dBm as advertised by <2nd other MAC>
diassociated from <2nd other MAC> (Reason: 1=UNSPECIFIED)

Often these occur every 5 minutes and loop for a while, then die away.

I saved some logs with

{ echo count from to;
  grep 'disconnect from AP' /var/log/messages |
    grep -o '\([[:xdigit:]][[:xdigit:]]:\?\)\{6\}' | paste - - |
    sort | uniq -c; } | column -t

which gave for example

count  from               to
3      <prefix>:2f:a9:51  <prefix>:2f:a9:59
22     <prefix>:2f:a9:51  <prefix>:d2:14:29
1      <prefix>:d2:14:21  <prefix>:2f:a9:59
2      <prefix>:d2:14:21  <prefix>:d2:14:29

As far as I can tell, the (masked) <prefix> there matches the output from another connected device when checking the router with arp -a:

gr6exx0c-a940.lan (192.168.2.1) at <prefix>:2f:a9:40 on en0 ifscope [ethernet]

And my management app says

• the router has a MAC of <prefix>:2f:a9:41
• the extender (MoCA) has a MAC of <prefix>:d2:14:10

So clearly something is going on here, and the NetworkManager is having trouble deciding which connection to use?

Miscellany

• dmesg -Hw is much nicer than regular dmesg
• Miscellaneous adventures in power management:
  • shutdown -hP didn’t power off, but reboot -p did reboot
  • Gentoo’s dist kernels have ACPI enabled (though you want to install the daemons and enable them at boot to get full features)
  • reboot=acpi is a valid kernel option in newer kernels, but not acpi=on (force is still valid, though unlikely to be needed)

• lspci -k >/dev/null complains:

    pcilib: Error reading /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:00:08.3/label: Operation not permitted
  

  but running with usual output doesn’t.

• Once I saw dmesg logs about my SSD?

    block nvme0n1: the capability attribute has been deprecated
    No UUID available providing old NGUID
  

• Related:
  • https://community.frame.work/t/framework-13-amd-ai-wifi-issue-on-arch-linux/71019/2
  • https://forum.garudalinux.org/t/mediatek-mt7925e-wifi-speed-very-slow-on-close-to-fresh-install-and-some-updates/41845/6
  • https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=300490

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