Bugzilla – Bug 653508
WLAN connection drops regularly with Intel N 6300 (rev 35)
Last modified: 2011-08-12 23:13:35 UTC
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.2.11) Gecko/20101012 Firefox/3.6.11 My WLAN connection drops regularly with Intel Corporation Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (rev 35). This even happens with distribution and the latest kernel 2.6.36. It is possible to reduce the frequency by using ping but it doesn't fix the problem. Often only removing the iwlagn module and adding it again fixes the problem. With 2.6.36 in general but also in openSUSE 11.4 it is even worse and ping doesn't help at all. It seems to be a firmware problem since the latest one http://intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-6000-ucode-9.221.4.1.tgz fixes the problem for me. Atm openSUSE 11.4 has the same 6000. firmware as 11.3 Since the api is compatible it should even be easily possible to fix the bug in 11.3 too through updating the firmware. According to similar bug reports (http://bugzilla.intellinuxwireless.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2214) it doesn't happen all the time with this card and every router but it is known and like I mentioned fixed at least in my case with the latest firmware. dmesg output: [ 144.276155] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Received BA when not expected [ 144.311555] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Received BA when not expected [ 144.427298] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Received BA when not expected [ 144.444577] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: low ack count detected, restart firmware [ 144.444582] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: On demand firmware reload [ 144.534753] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Stopping AGG while state not ON or starting [ 144.534759] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: queue number out of range: 0, must be 10 to 19 [ 169.235024] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Aggregation not enabled for tid 0 because load = 0 lspci output: 02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (rev 35) Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Get a laptop with Intel N 6300 WLAN card (for example Thinkpad X201) 2.Use the 2.6.36 Kernel because the frequency of connection dropping is much higher with it 3.Use the Internet or ping to check when it fails Actual Results: After some time the connection drops and you can't access the Internet or router anymore Expected Results: No connection problems at all.
Interesting, I have posted a bug report with an easy fix mentioned inside and it doesn't get any response after six weeks. What else do I need to add? Although I have only upgrade my system and since I have already replaced the firmware file manually I am not sure if the package has been upgraded in the mean time. Anyway the bug would be still an issue in OpenSUSE 11.3.
Greg, this one is fixed by a firmware update.
*** Bug 668130 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Ok, this problem is more complicated then I thought. At the time of the report I was using openSUSE 11.3 productive while 11.4 only for testing purposes for a short amount of time. I a have switched to 11.4 lately and realized that the the issue still appears even with the new firmware update (while probably less intense). So the firmware update fixes the issue on 11.3 but not on 11.4. I have made a bug report at Intel and they have posted a patch which helps but doesn't fix all issues. At least it makes WLAN useable on my machine again with 2.6.37. http://bugzilla.intellinuxwireless.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2214
Sorry, it was the wrong bug report: http://bugzilla.intellinuxwireless.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2287
So I have done some testing and it seems that in 11.4 the problem mainly appears in the 5 GHz band and not the 2.4 one. Nevertheless I also had this issue with openSUSE 11.3 and standard 802.11g. This was fixed by updating the firmware so please do so. I don't see what the problem is updating the firmware to a newer, compatible one which was released around eight months ago. Updating the firmware would fix the problem in 11.3 completely and on 11.4 at least the 2.4 GHz band should be fine.
So this issue still appears with the 11.4 final version and the firmware hasn't changed. 5 GHz is only working for a few minutes while 802.11g with 2.4 GHz seems to be working better.
Ick, why is this firmware change not upstream? Has the Intel developers said anything about that? I will look into updating our version of this firmware file in the kernel-firmware package...
Ok, can you try the kernel-firmware package at: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=kernel-firmware&project=home%3Agregkh%3Abranches%3AKernel%3AHEAD and let me know if it solves the problem for you or not?
Thanks for the package. The upgrade works but this sadly doesn't fix the 5 GHz problem with 2.6.37 anymore. Something relevant seems to have changed since 2.6.34. I am currently using 802.11g instead. [ 130.562208] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Received BA when not expected [ 161.762789] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: low ack count detected, restart firmware [ 161.762796] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: On demand firmware reload [ 161.842447] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Stopping AGG while state not ON or starting [ 161.842458] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: queue number out of range: 0, must be 10 to 19 [ 171.201366] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Aggregation not enabled for tid 0 because load = 0 [ 176.075605] iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Aggregation not enabled for tid 0 because load = 10 I am going to test it with 11.3 tomorrow. In 11.3 the problem was worse because even 802.11g had huge problems but on the other hand both issues could be circumvented with the new firmware most of the time. Since I haven't used 11.3 since quite some time I do some longer tests tomorrow.
But it solves the firmware problem, right? If so, I'll submit it for inclusion to the main repos.
So I have tested the new firmware with 11.3 and 5GHz WLAN works without problems. I have downloaded an iso and were running ping during the time and didn't lost one packet. There were also no firmware reload messages in dmesg. I am not sure what you mean with firmware problem. In 11.4 it doesn't fix the connection problem but I haven't seen the Microcode SW error. The last one doesn't have to mean anything because I haven't tested it as long.
Greg, could you please push a package update of kernel-firmware for 11.4 containing the updated blobs? It would fix a lot of reliability issues.
This is an autogenerated message for OBS integration: This bug (653508) was mentioned in https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/76047 Factory / kernel-firmware
Now done, submit request 78711