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Intel Woes
November 28th, 2020
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My wife and I own computers that have an Intel wireless card in them.  My
wife's computer is a laptop and mine is a desktop.  Within the past year, we've
had impactful bugs hit both computers that have caused wireless QoL to be
severely degraded.

In my wife's example, the wireless driver simply fails to load with an
ambiguous status code.  Enough sleuthing around online shows that many other
people have hit this bug which remained open up to the last time I checked a
month ago.  This particular fix was a major regression and for some reason a
fix wasn't easily backportable to earlier GNU/Linux kernel versions.  I've
tried compiling custom forks of mainline Ubuntu kernels with iwlwifi patches to
no avail.  Something is so seriously wrong that reverting back to even a 3.x
kernel version doesn't fix the issue.  She's been forced to use a USB wifi card
which works reliably through kernel updates but sticks out from a laptop and is
asking to be snapped off.

The bug I experience on my desktop is much more sneaky.  I will have
intermittent network drops as my card disconnects and reconnects after a couple
of seconds.  I notice this much more when playing real time online games as it
usually results in a server disconnect or in a loss of about 20 seconds or so
of game time for more forgiving game network code.  I am on Wi-Fi, but the
router is in the room right below where the desktop is kept; it's probably no
more than 10 feet away with a floor in between.

For my desktop computer, I can easily run some stats on my bug because it has
an easy to grep message of the number of times in a particular day that this
issue has affected me, sorted by the highest total number of occurrences in a
day.

$ sudo journalctl | grep "No beacon heard" | cut -c 1-6 | uniq -c | sort -h -r

   372 Jul 19
   277 Jul 16
   224 Jul 18
   198 Jun 27
   163 Aug 08
   140 Jul 15
   131 Jun 29
   106 Feb 02
   100 Jun 28
    99 Jul 01
    91 Feb 01
    83 Nov 28
    78 Mar 22
    69 Mar 21
    62 Nov 27
    62 Jul 02
    61 Nov 14
    61 Jul 11
    60 May 24
    53 Jul 13
    53 Jan 22
    51 Sep 13
    50 Aug 11
    48 Aug 09
    47 Jul 12
    45 Jan 24
    43 Nov 15
    41 Jun 05
    41 Jul 10
    40 Jan 17
    39 Jul 20
    39 Jul 06
    36 May 28
    36 Feb 03
    35 Jul 05
    35 Feb 23
    35 Aug 07
    34 Jul 04
    33 Sep 27
    33 Jul 17
    32 Aug 04
    31 Feb 04
    30 Mar 27
    29 Nov 16
    29 Nov 11
    28 Nov 23
    28 Nov 20
    28 May 25
    28 Jul 08
    28 Aug 05
    27 May 23
    24 Mar 30
    23 Feb 24
    22 Nov 26
    22 May 27
    21 May 22
    21 Jul 07
    20 Sep 12
    20 Nov 12
    19 Mar 29
    18 Aug 06
    17 Aug 12
    16 Nov 22
    16 Mar 20
    15 Jun 07
    15 Aug 13
    14 Oct 26
    13 Aug 10
    12 Nov 19
    12 Jul 03
    12 Jan 15
    12 Feb 09
    11 Sep 28
    11 Sep 26
    11 Nov 17
    10 Sep 24
    10 Nov 26
    10 May 31
     9 Oct 29
     8 Jun 01
     7 May 26
     7 Mar 04
     7 Feb 22
     6 Oct 08
     6 Mar 28
     6 Jul 09
     6 Jan 09
     6 Aug 14
     5 Mar 15
     5 Mar 08
     5 Jun 16
     5 Jan 29
     5 Jan 23
     5 Jan 12
     5 Feb 21
     5 Feb 16
     4 Oct 28
     4 Nov 13
     4 May 02
     4 Mar 01
     4 Jun 11
     4 Jan 26
     4 Jan 11
     4 Dec 01
     3 Sep 25
     3 Oct 22
     3 Oct 20
     3 Nov 07
     3 Mar 14
     3 Mar 07
     3 Jun 26
     3 Jul 26
     3 Jan 30
     3 Jan 14
     3 Jan 04
     3 Jan 02
     3 Feb 18
     3 Feb 17
     3 Feb 08
     3 Apr 29
     2 Oct 25
     2 Oct 09
     2 Oct 03
     2 Nov 20
     2 May 16
     2 Mar 16
     2 Jan 06
     2 Feb 28
     2 Dec 06
     2 Apr 26
     2 Apr 11
     2 Apr 10
     1 Oct 24
     1 Oct 23
     1 Oct 19
     1 Oct 03
     1 Nov 19
     1 Nov 17
     1 May 03
     1 Jul 14
     1 Jan 13
     1 Jan 05
     1 Feb 29
     1 Feb 14
     1 Dec 07
     1 Aug 02
     1 Apr 09

Seeing the bug tracker is even worse -- bugs that have been open for more than
a year with little follow-up from the developer's side.  Most of these bug
trackers are filled with people discussing hacks as workarounds when nothing is
being done.  Both of the open bugs affecting my wife and I are regressions to
existing functionality; both of us were plagued with these bugs after kernel
updates.  It makes me wonder what sort of testing (if any) that Intel is doing
with their GNU/Linux drivers.  Is there something that can be done to help?

I'm usually not perterbed when it comes to hardware and Linux capability but
running into these issues will make me very cautious about buying laptops or
components that include Intel technology in the future.  I've had my fair share
of issues with Realtek-based wireless chipsets as well, but those bugs seem to
be patched more easily and readily than anything Intel puts out.