iwlwifi broken on Kernel 5.3.18 (and 5.10.rc2) - Wifi lost/unstable for Intel Wireless 3160

[Luca]

@Luca
You have not the same Hardware as the one who asks here.
Please open a new thread.

I'm sorry, I wasn't clear.
I tried to say that it shouldn't be a problem with the intel card, since I had the same problem, and my card is atheros ...

[LS_47]

Update with some success...

@TSU

In a few other threads, ventoy has been mentioned as a recent new alternative for creating a USB stick.
Diff is that with ventoy...

Great suggestion! Not solving the issue but found it very useful and simple.

@arvidjaar
I didn't understand exactly how I could rename/move firmware and make driver load old ones.. I mean... where does it find the old ones after renaming?
(maybe I don't know well how it works....)

ANYWAY.. your basic suggestion made me check the 15.ZERO drivers.. and NOONE is different (number and names... apparently also contents...apparently)..BUT.. differenca was those in ZERO were not compressed XZ...

So.. I made some research..and decided to uncompress them..
Result is

# ls /lib/firmware/*3160* 
/lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3160-10.ucode  /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3160-16.ucode  /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3160-8.ucode 
/lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3160-12.ucode  /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3160-17.ucode  /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3160-9.ucode 
/lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3160-13.ucode  /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-3160-7.ucode

(note NO ".xz" extension)

So.. NOT but lot of Improvement ...because...
I managed to stay on Wifi..hours!

BUT... some combination of..unplugging power cable (!?!?) or ethernet cable.. or Bluetooth on/off (soft).. and SOME reboots (depending..apparently on kernel in use...) made me offline again.
It also seemed that eth cable plugged or not.. at reboot..may influence

When stuck again into NoWifiZone.. I had to retry other kernels and various combinatio of modprobe/rmmod on iwlwifi and iwlmvm..

As of now... I am on OpenSuse 15.2 (unreleased) Kernel v. 137 again

Linux linux-iotd 5.3.18-lp152.137.g1977cb0-default #1 SMP Wed Nov 4 09:13:48 UTC 2020 (1977cb0) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

And.. only thing I did (consciously.....) was decompressing 3160 drivers....

So not really solved..and..as other poster Luca noticed... may be also for other hardware.
I am thinking of..some strange "timing" maybe (on load time? because a Wifi router has some protocols and timings..different..from..i.e a keyboard)

I saw that xz compression was introduced in 5.3x recently if I am not mistaken... but I REPEAT.. I am not sure it is that the proble (though..that action, rebooting and some tinkering..have made me writing this whole post on Wifi... while before 1 minute connected was an achievement!)

I sense..it's not over here anyway....

Bye.

D.

[arvidjaar]

I didn't understand exactly how I could rename/move firmware and make driver load old ones.. I mean... where does it find the old ones after renaming?

Intel WiFi driver supports range of firmware versions. It tries to load firmware starting from the highest version; if it is not available it will try next version etc.

[john_hudson]

Dmesg shows various troubles on iwlwifi.

Thanks a lot if you can help.

There is already an open bug report on this: http://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1176649