I have a Lenovo G40-70 laptop that has this particular wifi card. I also don't think this bug is related to the firmware, but I do think that this issue is related to the driver, maybe this could get reassigned.
Since last year, I have followed a set of different tutorials, but none fully fixed my problem. Here are some of my findings:
- Using Jessie stock kernel (3.16), the connection using my device is very poor, and it disconnects very often (around every 10~30min). I attempted the aproach of setting some kernel parameters, without much success. Some of the parameters to set to avoid this due to powersave are not even available in that kernel version.
- I found the rtlwifi_new Github repo, but was unable to test it. But I also noted that Larry Finger merged some important paches into the mainstream Kernel, and decided to try newer kernels.
- I did a custom build of the kernel 3.18 and 4.0.1, with better results, but the issue was just attenuated. I was able to use the connection much better than with the previous kernel, but was unable to keep it fully working. Randomly, the connection dropped. The way I would describe dropped is: you browse a site, then you click a link, and the new tab open the link, get "loading" for a few seconds, and raises "error no internet". When the connection was dropped, I had to manually disconnect using Network Manager, then reconnect. This was happening randomly, anything between a few minutes to, eventually, some hours of usage.
An infinity loop when running iperf was triggering the behavior of a "blocked" wifi, which, from my analysis bellow, was the actual root cause of my random disconnects: if those blocks were in the process of a wpa rekey event or the like.
I was able to build 4.1.4 and could notice that the patch indeed fixed the random disconnection issues for me.
For the reference about the bug, here are my wifi adapter information (from lspci -v):
02:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
Subsystem: Lenovo Device b736
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 19
I/O ports at 3000 [size=256]
Memory at c0400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Capabilities: [70] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [140] Device Serial Number 00-23-b7-fe-ff-4c-e0-00
Capabilities: [150] Latency Tolerance Reporting
Capabilities: [158] L1 PM Substates
Kernel driver in use: rtl8723be
And my modproble setup: # cat /etc/modprobe.d/rtl_wifi.conf
options rtl8723be fwlps=0 swlps=0 ips=1 msi=1 debug=0
Hope this helps investigate the problem. Also, the same issues happen with another wifi card I have, rtl8192cu; this one was not affected by the patch and I'll test it as well on the newer kernel.
Please let me know if you want me to help doing any further tests in order to help diagnose/debug/fix the problem.
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