I figured it out.
Even though you can set your region with
sudo iw reg set US
and it appears to be set when I checked. I found that in
/sys/module/cfg80211/parameters/ieee80211_regdom
it was set to world (00)
Disabling power save didn’t seem to do anything to help
Using
echo "options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=US" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/mt7921-kernel67-fix.conf
and then reboot
Did the trick
Not sure why the region isn’t getting set correctly, but this has survived several reboots.
Hope this helps someone else.
Does anyone know what/how to get ieee80211_regdom to configure properly? I haven’t had any success searching the internet for a good answer.
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Nice find!
For an adapter in managed (aka client) mode though, I would have expected passive scanning to be enabled for the 6GHz band by default, and so the AP to be discoverable. Isn’t the general approach that it’s up to the AP to “dictate” the regulatory domain?
That’s is my thoughts exactly. I’m really puzzled as to what really went wrong. I will say my linux install has been the same since about 2014. Just updated many times, even after a new pc build. maybe I should do a fresh install with limited restore (my files only) and see if that makes a difference.
For what it’s worth I reproduced this (regdom 00 by default, now set to US by modprobe). But in my use case it’s kind of moot as I don’t have a 6GHz AP around.
As to the cause, I dunno, leaving the regdom as “I dunno” makes sense for a mobile client device which can travel to different reg domains. So IMO it’s the adapter firmware’s (or the kernel driver’s?) decision/“fault” for not scanning at 6GHz in that scenario.
Being that there doesn’t seem to be actual firmware for the mt7921e, and it appears to “piggyback” off another driver’s firmware could be the issue in itself. I did read somewhere along this journey this “issue” has occurred with intel cards as well, although I cannot find the actual article I was reading atm. One would think, when the ip address, dhcp, etc is pulled from the carrier, the region could automatically be identified, or even when installing the wireless-regdm package, some sort of “config” process should run to identify the region at that time.