WiFi Connection Issues

[ProjectMoon]

I've encountered an issue where I'm unable to connect to WiFi networks anymore. I am not exactly sure what happened, but I was previously able to connect just fine, and then now I cannot connect to any. No connection seems to work, and all Sailfish says is that there was an error connecting. Forgetting the network and reconnecting does not work, neither does rebooting.

Presumably there's somewhere I can dig into the log files for internet connectivity. Where to start looking?

[ProjectMoon]

So I managed to fix this by turning of Connman's DNS proxy. I noticed that the phone had no DNS, By creating a file at /var/lib/environment/connman/nodnsproxy.conf with the contents:

CONNMAN_ARGS="--nodnsproxy"

The phone falls back to normal DHCP in /etc/resolv.conf and then DNS (and internet) work just fine.

[ProjectMoon]

More info on the inability to connect to wifi, from the system logs (journalctl):

wpa_supplicant[2664]: wlan0: Trying to associate with xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (SSID='abc123') freq=2457 MHz)
wpa_supplicant[2664]: wlan0: Association request to the driver failed.
wpa_supplicant[2664]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SSID-TEMP-DISABLED id=0 ssid="abc123" auth_failures=1 duration=10 reason=CONN_FAILED

Edit: Also seeing this exact same error on Ubuntu Touch, with similar connectivity issues. So it's not at the higher levels at all. Same symptoms... can't see any networks, much less connect to them. Some very basic connectivity worked only a few times.

[DylanVanAssche]

For some reason, I cannot reproduce this... Can you maybe explain a bit your network setup?

[ProjectMoon]

It is a mesh network, using Orbi routers. I suspect this issue is at the driver level, as I see similar results and the exact same logs in the syslog on Ubuntu Touch.

Are there any log levels to turn up in dmesg/syslog that could produce more useful output?

I should note the phone is rather stable with my Android phone's wifi tethering. I think the driver doesn't play nicely with repeaters/meshes. I see similar issues on my work network.

The phone also refuses to connect to any other wifi network once disconnecting from another.

[DylanVanAssche]

The driver of the WiFi/BT chip is not great at the moment. A better driver is in the works I heard.
So I guess we should wait until the better driver comes into play (with power management!)

[piggz]

@ProjectMoon can you confirm this is still an issue with the latest release?

[ProjectMoon]

I tried Sailfish OS the other day, and the WiFi seems much more stable than it was in the beginning. Instead of dropping completely and never turning back on, it often gets very slow, sometimes disconnects (especially after screen off), and usually comes back. It did die once though.

But I suspect this is a driver issue for the PinePhone, less so than SFOS.

[ProjectMoon]

Current versions of the image have extremely unstable WiFI when I test them. More unstable than it used to be even. Is anyone else experiencing this?

[simonschmeisser]

Yes, same here. It often disconnects, sometimes I can "restart" it by toggling the button but sometimes then it doesn't want to re-connect at all

[DylanVanAssche]

WiFi is not very great on the dev phone I have (1.0).
But I think this happens on other OSes too? Can anyone please test if other OSes are suffering from the same issue?

[ProjectMoon]

All signs point to it being related to the wifi driver, yes. When I first opened this, it was January and Sailfish OS is the one I tested first.

There are specifically problems related to mesh networks.

But I do think distros like Ubuntu Touch have fairly reliable wifi, at least after a warm reboot. Is the SFOS port using the latest Pinephone wifi driver?

[piggz]

We are using the new driver iirc

[Qiangong2]

Still having the wifi issue. I can connect to open networks, but not WPA2 networks. I can connect to WPA2 networks on UBPorts