Intel AX210 wireless issues (ping spikes and disconnects)

Framework Laptop 16 Linux
1

So, I had ping spikes and device lockups on my Mediatek card, so after some fruitless efforts I just bought an Intel AX210 instead. It seems like it’s been working fine, but as of this week it started showing ping spikes and disconnects also, as well as issues with the device itself disappearing and then coming back.

I looked in the log and found this:

[ 5217.241411] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Queue 2 is stuck 61887 61934
[ 5217.242294] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Microcode SW error detected. Restarting 0x0.
[ 5217.242927] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Start IWL Error Log Dump:
[ 5217.242932] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Transport status: 0x0000004A, valid: 6
[ 5217.242937] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Loaded firmware version: 89.af655058.0 ty-a0-gf-a0-89.ucode

… and then lots and lots of debugging output as it restarts the device. For some ridiculous reason, this forum won’t let me just upload the whole log, but some selected lines to give the flavor of what is happening:

[ 5217.241411] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Queue 2 is stuck 61887 61934
[ 5217.242294] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Microcode SW error detected. Restarting 0x0.
[ 5217.858835] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Device error - SW reset
[ 5217.859235] ieee80211 phy0: Hardware restart was requested
[ 5229.059059] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Device error - SW reset
[ 5229.059480] ieee80211 phy0: Hardware restart was requested
[ 5229.368104] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: restart completed
[ 5253.081944] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Queue 1 is stuck 948 1003
[ 5253.082845] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Microcode SW error detected. Restarting 0x0.
[ 5254.031602] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: restart completed
[ 7559.666505] cros-ec-dev cros-ec-dev.1.auto: Some logs may have been dropped...
[ 7845.876100] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Queue 1 is stuck 27103 27122
[ 7845.876969] iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: Microcode SW error detected. Restarting 0x0.

And so on. As it’s doing any particular reset, obviously the network is unusable, and it enters into a user-visible flaky state for sometimes a pretty extended length of time.

The weird thing is that when looking back in kernel logs, I see that this has been happening the entire time since I installed the AX210 (periodically resetting the device because of a microcode error), but it seems in my subjective feeling like only recently it’s gotten bad enough that it was visible to me in the form of network flakiness. Sometimes it’ll go days without happening, and then sometimes it’ll start happening several times a minute and take down stuff I’m trying to do with the network or mean that the device isn’t even visible while it’s trying to get itself back going again.

It doesn’t seem especially correlated with kernel version, it seems like it just happens intermittently.

Anyone seen this / anyone have ideas?

Which Linux distro are you using? NixOS

Which release version? 25.05.20250807.e728d7a (Warbler)

Which kernel are you using? 6.16.0

Which BIOS version are you using? 03.05

Which Framework Laptop 16 model are you using? Ryzen 7 7840HS

1 Like
2

I’ve been having similar issues for the last few weeks. I’m on Arch. Same Intel AX210 wireless chip.

3

Similar symptoms here, but on an old FW13. Only started happening to me recently after owning this thing for almost what 4? 5 years now? So was suspecting the hardware was starting to fail, but now I’m wondering if it’s actually a kernel issue? (assuming NixOS & Arch gets newer kernels before Ubuntu does)

Up-to-date Ubuntu 25.10, Framework 13 12th gen, Linux 6.17.0-8-generic, firmware 03.19

4

So framework eventually shipped me a replacement mainboard which cured this problem in addition to some GPU hangs. The new one seems to have some issues with suspend and resume, which I honestly just haven’t had the patience to dig into so far, but other than that it’s working now and if I always just fully power down / fully power up then it’s stable.

It does seem like certain kernel versions made the network issue more pronounced, and in general it was so random and intermittent that it’s hard to say for sure. I actually do log messages similar to this still sometimes, but it’s not anything that causes trouble that bothers me. Before, it was like 30 seconds of total network outage multiple times a day which was definitely irritating. If I had to take a total stab in the dark I would say hardware issues was the cause for me. Definitely kernel 6.17 is fine, there were some around the 6.14 era that made it worse (apparently, maybe) but I’ve been running 6.17 for a while and it’s been fine.

5

Oh nice getting the mainboard replaced. Suspend has always worked fine for me on Ubuntu, tbh I think that’s more likely to be a setup or software issue if its not working well for you.

I actually opened up the case yesterday after replying to make sure the wifi card was seated fine, and am pretty sure that one of the two antenna connectors may have been either loose and/or touching the other one. In any case after putting it back together and ensuring there’s a gap between them, I haven’t had the problem since, where over the last few days it was happening all the time, across reboots. So fingers crossed here.

1 Like