Possible wifi issue with upcoming kernel version 5.5

Hi all!

The upcoming Linux kernel version 5.5 may have issues with wifi connections.
For that reason, before upgrading to kernel 5.5, make sure you have the LTS kernel installed too.
Then you’ll have a working alternative that allows you to use wifi.

Commands:

    sudo pacman -S linux-lts linux-lts-headers

EDIT: sorry, I forgot to add the re-generation command for grub:

    sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

    reboot  # after reboot you can select either linux or linux-lts kernel for boot

Thanks @Resiliencia :smile:

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The new version of the Linux Kernel 5.5 has been released and these are its new features:

After two months of development, Linus Torvalds released the Linux 5 kernel version.5, version in which among the most notable changes, we can find the ability to assign alternative names to network interfaces, the integration of cryptographic functions of the Zinc library, the ability to duplicate more than 2 disks in RAID1 Btrfs, the mechanism for monitoring the status of live patches, the test framework of the kunit drive, the increased performance of the mac80211 wireless stack, the ability to access the root partition through the SMB protocol and much more.

The new version adopted 15505 developer patches, the patch size is 44 MB (changes affected 11781 files, 609208 lines of code were added, 292520 lines were removed). About 44% of all changes in 5.5 are related to device drivers, about 18% of changes are related to updating the code specific to hardware architectures, 12% are connected to the network stack, 4% to file systems and 3% to internal kernel subsystems.

Key new features of the Linux 5.5 Kernel

In this new version of the Linux 5.5 Kernel, support for the xxhash64, blake2b and sha256 checksums for the Btrfs file system has been added.

In the RAID1 implementation, it is possible to mirror data on three (raid1c3) or four (raid1c4) devices (previously mirroring was limited to two devices), allowing you to save data while losing 2 or 3 devices at the same time.

While Ext4 provides the ability to use smaller blocks for encryption (previously, encryption was done only by blocks whose size matched the size of the memory pages (4096)).

In F2FS it implements a file fixation mode with alignment along the 2 MB edge for placement in a completely correct segment, which ensures no further redistribution of this file by the garbage collector.

Another important new feature is the added support for monitoring the status of temperature sensors on NVMe devices using the hwmon API (supporting libsensors and the “sensors” command), access to which does not require elevated privileges (previously, temperature information was reflected in the “smart log”, which was available only to root).

In addition, as part of the main WireGuard VPN integration project, many functions of the Zinc cryptographic library were transferred to the standard Crypto API, including fast implementations of the ChaCha20 and Poly1305 algorithms.

The x86 architecture KVM hypervisor provides the ability to process nested tables of five memory page levels and adds support for XSAVES instructions for AMD processors. For ARM64 processors, the ability to transmit time information was added.

Support for the blake2b hash function has also been added to the cryptographic subsystem, providing very high hash performance while maintaining reliability at the SHA-3 level, as well as a condensed version of Blake2s.

Another significant change in this new version of the Linux 5.5 Kernel is the new mechanism for assigning alternative names to network interfaces, which allows multiple names to be used simultaneously for one interface (including the use of multiple udev templates).

The name size can be up to 128 characters (previously the network interface name was limited to 16 characters).

To attach an additional name, use the “ip link prop add” command (e.g., “ip link prop add enx00e04c361e4c altname someothername”). The implementation is based on attaching additional properties to the interface and can be expanded in the future with other parameters, not limited to alternative names.

Finally, if you want to know more about the complete list of changes included in this new version of the Linux Kernel, you can check it out at the following link: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/1/26/232

As for the layout of the new version, you can download the code to compile the Kernel from its official website or wait for the compiled packages to be included within the repositories of your distribution.

Source: https://blog.desdelinux.net/

2 Likes

From Linus Torvalds <>


Date Sun, 26 Jan 2020 16:39:01 -0800
Subject Linux 5.5

So this last week was pretty quiet, and while we had a late network
update with some (mainly iwl wireless) network driver and netfilter
module loading fixes, David didn’t think that warranted another -rc.
And outside of that, it’s really been very quiet indeed - there’s a
panfrost driver update too, but again it didn’t really seem to make
sense to delay the final release by another week.

Outside of those, it’s all really tiny, even if some of those tiny
changes touched some core files.

So despite the slight worry that the holidays might have affected the
schedule, 5.5 ended up with the regular rc cadence and is out now.

That means that the merge window for 5.6 will open tomorrow, and I
already have a couple of pull requests pending. The timing for this
next merge window isn’t optimal for me - I have some travel and other
things going on during the same two weeks, but hopefully it won’t be
all that noticeable. But there might be random timezones, odd hours,
and random delays because of that. I try to avoid scheduling things
during the merge window, but hey, it doesn’t always work out, and I’d
have to delay things by two weeks to avoid the conflicts, which just
doesn’t seem worth it.

Particularly since it’s not necessarily going to be a problem to begin
with. We’ll see.

Anyway. Go out and test 5.5, and start sending me those pull requests
for all the new development that is ready,

Linus

Source: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/1/26/232

2 Likes

Will Arch Linux stays with the current 5.4.x Kernel or do they change to 5.5.x?

Arch and all the rolling distros will have this kernel and everyone after it. :slight_smile:

Ah. Ok.

So, as implied, it is good to have two kernel versions installed:
linux
linux-lts
and their headers.

Then if one of them starts failing after an update, the other one probably still works, and possible fixes are easier to do.

Theoretical i enter:

sudo pacman -S linux-lts linux-lts-header

And what else? I’m using now Kernel 5.5 and it doesn’t work. How do i switch to lts kernel please?

Is this the change that can cause issues? I did some searching and didn’t find anything about WiFi issues in 5.5.

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sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Then reboot and in the grub you can opt for the LTS kernel

Perfect, thank you @Resiliencia

I also did some research on it and I haven’t found anything, so far…
They are possible problems, did you read these comments by Linus ?
https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/1/26/232

You may also want to modify the default kernel in grub. Otherwise by default you will boot into the lts kernel.
See this link: https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/cli-modification-of-grub-in-multi-boot-systems/2345/2

1 Like

Yes of course, thank you as well :slight_smile:@Endlich

Thank you, piperdan. At the moment i have just four options to choose.

  1. LTS Kernel
  2. LTS Kernel Fallback
  3. 5.4 Kernel
  4. 5.4 Kernel Fallback

The following line i’ve edited:

Line 3: GRUB_DEFAULT=2 (changed from 0)

Then Ctrl + O and Enter and then Ctrl + X to close. Reboot then.
But the marked line is still on the first entry, or does this say nothing at all?
btw: I know that this question/problem doesn’t belong here, should i open another topic for it?

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It’s better to keep everything tidy ! :slight_smile:

After the edits, don’t forget:

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
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@piperdan:tired_face: :woozy_face: Yeah… i should be better read first and post then. I’m sorry! Now it worked perfectly. Thank you.

Yes @Resiliencia, i’m sorry! But at least my problem is solved. :+1:

The LTS will be changing to 5.4 soon as well.

That would be my next question to you guys. :joy:
But i will re-install my os again and when i’m lucky it’s already then the new lts kernel 5.4.