Bluetooth only works after cold boot

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

I have the Intel Ax210 chip for WiFi and Bluetooth both of which worked fine until two days ago. After yesterday’s daily boot up of my pc, I noticed that Bluetooth was off in gnome-settings which was not responsive to my attempts at turning it on (the GUI slider was not turning it on). Output of different commands I’ve tried are below.

systemctl status bluetooth.service

● bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
     Active: active (running) since Wed 2021-08-04 09:42:07 PDT; 11min ago
       Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)
   Main PID: 569 (bluetoothd)
     Status: "Running"
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 38316)
     Memory: 2.2M
        CPU: 37ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/bluetooth.service
             └─569 /usr/lib/bluetooth/bluetoothd

Aug 04 09:42:06 Endeavour bluetoothd[569]: Bluetooth daemon 5.60
Aug 04 09:42:05 Endeavour systemd[1]: Starting Bluetooth service...
Aug 04 09:42:07 Endeavour systemd[1]: Started Bluetooth service.
Aug 04 09:42:07 Endeavour bluetoothd[569]: Starting SDP server
Aug 04 09:42:07 Endeavour bluetoothd[569]: Bluetooth management interface 1.20 initialized


dmesg | grep -i bluetooth

[   17.311525] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.22
[   17.311546] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[   17.311549] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[   17.311551] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[   17.311553] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[   17.388303] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware timestamp 2021.19 buildtype 1 build 25171
[   17.390307] Bluetooth: hci0: No device address configured
[   17.503609] Bluetooth: hci0: Found device firmware: intel/ibt-0041-0041.sfi
[   17.503775] Bluetooth: hci0: Boot Address: 0x100800
[   17.503780] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware Version: 83-19.21
[   17.503784] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware already loaded
[   19.608686] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[   19.608693] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast
[   19.608702] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized
[  268.101698] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware timestamp 2021.19 buildtype 1 build 25171
[  268.103234] Bluetooth: hci0: No device address configured
[  268.103433] Bluetooth: hci0: Found device firmware: intel/ibt-0041-0041.sfi
[  268.103455] Bluetooth: hci0: Boot Address: 0x100800
[  268.103456] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware Version: 83-19.21
[  268.103458] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware already loaded
[  438.716396] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware timestamp 2021.19 buildtype 1 build 25171
[  438.718282] Bluetooth: hci0: No device address configured
[  438.718479] Bluetooth: hci0: Found device firmware: intel/ibt-0041-0041.sfi
[  438.718503] Bluetooth: hci0: Boot Address: 0x100800
[  438.718504] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware Version: 83-19.21
[  438.718506] Bluetooth: hci0: Firmware already loaded

I’ve also trying to unload and reload the modules as well as restarting bluetooth.service. bluetoothctl outputs No default controller available Nothing seems out of the ordinary to me in the logs and I’m unable to identify where the issue is. Strangely enough, cold booting my pc (unplugging the power cable after shutdown) fixed the issue for the following boot but is obviously not a long term solution. I got the idea from here. If it is of any significance, I’m using the 5.13.7-arch1-1 kernel.

2

Does this also happen on the LTS kernel? I would use and test that and see if it produces the same results or not. The trouble with the mainline current kernel is that it is known to have regressions and bugs, so unless you know for a fact you need it for new hardware that you may have (i’m talking like within less than a year new hardware), I would encourage you to use the LTS kernel.

3

Unfortunately, the LTS kernel does not have drivers for the ax210 since the chip came out less than a year ago and is fully supported on kernel versions >5.10. I can try downgrading my system to see if that works though.

4

Hmm, well the 5.13 kernel does get updated quite frequently, at least once or twice a week sometimes. If you haven’t already, please do also backup any files you have with like Grsync or Deja-Dup or Pika Backup for your personal files (i.e. Documents, Music, Movies, etc) and in addition have Timeshift backups as well for your system snapshots. If you need to you can use this to help you setup Timeshift: https://discovery.endeavouros.com/applications/update-troubles-meet-timeshift/2019/11/

I know the above doesn’t fix your issue at the moment, but these steps are a good practice to have for when problems like this arise, you can always revert to a previous snapshot or like you said downgrade and wait for a future update to hopefully fix your problem if it did end of being a package regression/bug of course.