Ubuntu – 19.10 big issue with intel 9260ac wifi: iwlwifi brings system to a halt

19.10inteliwlwifiwireless

I run a Thinkpad T460p with an Intel 9260ac wifi card. 19.04 ran great.

I upgraded to 19.10 (and I get the same from the live version) and as soon as there is any significant traffic on the wifi, the system goes to a crawl, freezes, unfreezes and then the trackpad/trackpoint become choppy and I will have to open a terminal (outside X) and reboot.

This is the journal.

Initially I thought this was a hardware error. After all that's how the log starts:

Oct 20 01:51:16 weywot kernel: iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Start IWL Error Log Dump:

But wifi is flawless in windows, and works fine with 19.04.

So I went for the firmware. There are 5 iwlwifi-9260-th-b0-jf-b0-XX files in /lib/firmware, and firmware loads ok.

I was able to find newer versions of firmware and try them all. I was able to upgrade the Bios and this limited the problem to a rather (and relatively) harmless error as in this log.

Trying individual files I found the .34 version to stop the problem altogether, so at least I now have my system working again.

Has anyone had problems with 19.10 and the 9260ac wifi?

The main part of the problem is that this exists as soon as I boot the Live version (and as such I can only install when wifi is off, otherwise it crashes).

Any advice/input would be welcome. Thanks.

Best Answer

For now, here's a solution that seems reasonably stable for me on Ubuntu MATE 19.10 with kernel 5.3.0-19:

  1. Copy the 9260 firmware microcode version 34 from wireless.wiki.kernel.org to /lib/firmware.

  2. Put the following line in /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf:

    options iwlwifi power_save=0 11n_disable=1

  3. Reboot.

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