Bug#969319: wifi cannot connect after combined suspend & gateway reboot

[Andreas Henriksson <andreas@fatal.se>]

Hi all,

On Tue, Sep 08, 2020 at 11:35:27PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
[...]
> I'm bringing Andreas, the maintainer iwd into the loop here.
[...]

(Seems you forgot to CC me but I stumbled upon this, so giving my 5c....)

FYI I lost interest and orphaned iwd.

I'm can't tell if this is an iwd or NM bug. My best recommendation is
to try without NM, connecting via iwctl and see if the problem can
be reproduced standalone to help finding that out. Please also contact
iwd upstream directly, either via their mailing list or irc channel.
Make sure to include iwmon traces and debug output for them to be able
to properly analyze what's going on.


In my own experience there are many issues lingering in the NM iwd
backend before it can be expected to be production quality. A very
good way of triggering NM iwd backend problems is by using a
hidden SSID for unknown reason. Please note that NM actively refused to
connect to a hidden SSID using the iwd backend until recently (and I
only fixed up the very basic things so that it is not actively refused,
there should be comments on the upstream issue/merge-request about
several remaining problems that needs to be adressed still if you're
interested).

Please note:
- iwd upstream actively discurages usage of hidden SSIDs simply because
  there's no upside and many downsides to using it.
- NM upstream actively discurages using the iwd backend (likely because
  they are tired of noone contributing to fixing it up).

For a data point you can compare against, I'm using NM with iwd backend
myself against a hidden SSID quite often. I only quickly glanced over
your description, but I don't feel like I can relate to your problem
description. I can however say that I do have to apply different hacks
to get things going more often then I'd want to. Usually doing (a) below
solves hickups when NM doesn't get along anymore with iwd, but rarely
I also need to do (b) when NM decides there are no usable interfaces
available.

a/ systemctl stop iwd ; systemctl restart NetworkManager ; poke the
   GNOME ui to "select [wifi] network" so that NM dbus activates iwd
   again.
b/ systemctl stop iwd; systemctl stop NetworkManager; rmmod <wifi_driver>;
   modprobe <wifi_driver>; systemctl start NetworkManager ; ...


Regards,
Andreas Henriksson