Connecting to WiFi freezes my system

Issues & Assistance
1

Hi.

I have discovered that if I connect to any WiFi network from my laptop with RebornOS, seconds later the system freezes everything and I can only force shutdown the laptop.
The model / driver that I have installed is Realtek RTL8821CE. I also have a wired network connection and on that I don’t get any problems.
I have been lucky that I have the router so I needed to power it off while I forgot the WiFi connection otherwise at every startup the system would freeze.

This is the basic network information that I have:

[mmx@INV-7654-VV ~]$ ifconfig
enp2s0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.1.18  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.1.255
        ether 70:b3:d5:16:98:eb  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 972  bytes 284766 (278.0 KiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 7  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 763  bytes 120320 (117.5 KiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING>  mtu 65536
        inet 127.0.0.1  netmask 255.0.0.0
        inet6 ::1  prefixlen 128  scopeid 0x10<host>
        loop  txqueuelen 1000  (Local Loopback)
        RX packets 38  bytes 4159 (4.0 KiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 38  bytes 4159 (4.0 KiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

wlp1s0: flags=4099<UP,BROADCAST,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        ether 3e:ba:29:17:9d:12  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

[mmx@INV-7654-VV ~]$

also my kernel is:

[mmx@INV-7654-VV ~]$ uname -a
Linux INV-7654-VV 5.12.15-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed, 07 Jul 2021 23:35:29 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Is there any hope for me to use this WiFi card with RebornOS? Is it incompatible with the system?
One thing I managed to find is something about Disabling Power Management that may help, still researching to see how I can do that, do you know by any chance if I can disable that feature and how?

EDIT: Managed to turn off power management in the WiFi card and now the system is no longer frozen.

image
image706×509 33 KB

Now… I would need to add this script at every computer boot/start-up. Would anyone be kind to let me know of how I could do that please? Or how to disable this wifi power management permanently? :smiley:

Thank you!

2

@laur It’s possible to put it into a systemd service for it to startup everytime. But that will be a hacky way to get things done. Before that, could you try the below?

sudo pacman -S networkmanager
sudo pacman -S --needed gedit
sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/81-wifi-powersave.rules

Paste the below line:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="net", KERNEL=="wl*", RUN+="/usr/bin/iw dev $name set power_save off"

Save, exit, and reboot

Please let me know if this works :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
3

Hi.

Thank you very much for your help!

Yes, it does seem indeed that this trick disables power save for my WiFi card at startup
After this and rebooting, I don’t see my system freezing right away like last time. I will test it out and see if it still freezes and will update you, but for now it’s ok.

Screenshot from 2021-07-13 11-41-29
Screenshot from 2021-07-13 11-41-29706×509 43.2 KB

It seems that for some reason this happens more often on WPA3-SAE WiFi than on the WPA2-AES WiFi that I am connected to, but may not be related to that.

Once again many thanks. Really appreciate it :slight_smile:

1 Like
4

Sure. Please let me know if your computer freezes again