I recently performed a blanket upgrade on my system that started causing NetworkManager to drop and fail every so often. Strangely, it seems to happen most commonly at the
git checkout step when I run
yay -Syu and sporadically otherwise.
Here's a snippet from my
/var/log/pacman.log file containing some of the relevant upgrades:
[ALPM] upgraded artix-keyring (20211026-1 -> 20220309-1)
[ALPM] upgraded artix-mirrorlist (20220224-1 -> 20220318-1)
[ALPM] upgraded linux (5.16.12.artix1-1 -> 5.16.16.artix1-1)
[ALPM] upgraded linux-firmware (20220209.6342082-1 -> 20220309.cd01f85-1)
[ALPM] upgraded networkmanager (1.36.0-1 -> 1.36.2-1)
I attempted to rollback
networkmanager to v1.36.0-1 and to disable all other networking-related services (e.g.
tailscale,
nftables, etc.), but the problem has persisted.
Is this a familiar problem to anyone? If so, are there any good solutions/workarounds? Thanks in advance and please let me know if there's any additional information I could provide to help with debugging.
This is evidently the result of upstream failures related to the ath9k wireless card driver (see here (https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/74187)). For anyone encountering similar issues, I'd recommend trying this workaround (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NetworkManager#Regular_network_disconnects,_latency_and_lost_packets_(WiFi)) for the time being; it isn't perfect (network drops still occur), but it at least makes reconnects automatic.
There was a recent thread on StackExchange (https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/696458/arch-linux-networkmanager-wifi-randomly-droppingv) with a similar topic.
If the issue is with the driver upstream, it will likely be resolved soon.
Other than that, in general NetworkManager is not really needed for WiFi if one can live without an eye candy applet in their DE - wpa_supplicant + dhcpcd are enough (and there are GUIs for wpa_supplicant as well).