Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 Acces point mode regression

Marichan · 2025-09-01 21:59:36

Hi all, I use my old wifi card in my tower as an access point for my other devices. I had no problems with it, managed by network manager for months. However since coming back from an august trip I noticed my devices (both an android phone and my steam deck) disconnecting every few seconds from the ap, despite being able to receive internet traffic while they are connected just fine. Before the first week of august everything was fine.
I did your obvious first troubleshooting steps

# lspci -v
06:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 (rev bb)
        Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 [Wilkins Peak 2]
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 55
        Memory at f7b00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>
        Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
        Kernel modules: iwlwifi

# iwconfig
wlan0     IEEE 802.11  Mode:Master  Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry short limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on

# dmesg | grep iwlwifi
[    4.298011] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[    4.298493] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: Detected crf-id 0x0, cnv-id 0x0 wfpm id 0x0
[    4.298502] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: PCI dev 08b1/4070, rev=0x144, rfid=0xd55555d5
[    4.298504] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: Detected Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless AC 7260
[    4.303774] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: loaded firmware version 17.bfb58538.0 7260-17.ucode op_mode iwlmvm
[    4.530900] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: base HW address: 7c:5c:f8:ab:e0:2d, OTP minor version: 0x0
[    6.342473] iwlwifi 0000:06:00.0: Registered PHC clock: iwlwifi-PTP, with index: 0

# systemctl status wpa_supplicant.service 
● wpa_supplicant.service - WPA supplicant
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/wpa_supplicant.service; disabled; preset: disabled)
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2025-09-01 23:34:20 CEST; 10min ago
 Invocation: 8e11147780194d7fbefa4f1224950d94
   Main PID: 993 (wpa_supplicant)
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 18960)
     Memory: 7.5M (peak: 8.2M)
        CPU: 57ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/wpa_supplicant.service
             └─993 /usr/bin/wpa_supplicant -u -s -O /run/wpa_supplicant

Sep 01 23:34:21 ArchHome wpa_supplicant[993]: wlan0: interface state UNINITIALIZED->ENABLED
Sep 01 23:34:21 ArchHome wpa_supplicant[993]: wlan0: AP-ENABLED
Sep 01 23:34:21 ArchHome wpa_supplicant[993]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 7c:5c:f8:ab:e0:2d completed [id=0 id_str=]
Sep 01 23:34:50 ArchHome wpa_supplicant[993]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-FAILED ret=-95
Sep 01 23:34:55 ArchHome wpa_supplicant[993]: wlan0: AP-STA-CONNECTED 12:c9:02:54:53:95
Sep 01 23:34:55 ArchHome wpa_supplicant[993]: wlan0: EAPOL-4WAY-HS-COMPLETED 12:c9:02:54:53:95
Sep 01 23:35:10 ArchHome wpa_supplicant[993]: wlan0: AP-STA-DISCONNECTED 12:c9:02:54:53:95
Sep 01 23:42:18 ArchHome wpa_supplicant[993]: wlan0: AP-STA-CONNECTED 12:c9:02:54:53:95
Sep 01 23:42:18 ArchHome wpa_supplicant[993]: wlan0: EAPOL-4WAY-HS-COMPLETED 12:c9:02:54:53:95
Sep 01 23:42:33 ArchHome wpa_supplicant[993]: wlan0: AP-STA-DISCONNECTED 12:c9:02:54:53:95

The only distress signal I can see is on wpa-supplicant throwing AP-STA-DISCONNECTED. I searched the journal and didn't notice anything particular. I also tried monitoring the interface with wireshark and nothing seemed out of the ordinary on there.
Only perplexing thing was:

# iwctl 
NetworkConfigurationEnabled: enabled
StateDirectory: /var/lib/iwd
Version: 3.9
[iwd]# ap wlan0 show
                             Access Point Interface                            
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Settable  Property              Value               
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Started               no                    
            Name                                        
            Scanning              no                    
            Frequency             0                     
            PairwiseCiphers                             
            GroupCipher

but i think it is normal when the interface is managed by wpa-supplicant/network manager?
I also tried downgrading to july's linux-firmware-intel without any result.

Does anyone have a similar setup and noticed similar problems, or any idea on how to check if this is a network manager/driver/kernel problem?

EDIT2: disregard the previous edit below. it has been in the logs since forever (checked back to the start of the year) and apparently just a "false" log message by looking on the internet
EDIT. Dug a bit more into the wpa_supplicant log and:

21:34:21.439 UTC wpa_supplicant.service Note: nl80211 driver interface is not designed to be used with ap_scan=2; this can result in connection failures

well that seems to be a good lead, but why would it be set? New bug in wpa_supplicant or NM? Also I guess this makes it more of a software problem. If so would some moderator move the topic? Sorry for the inconvenience

EDIT: It's officially a kernel bug
Downgrading to linux-6.15.8 fixes it. I am going to inch my way up the kernel version until I find the one that breaks it. If someone has more knowledge, should I report this first to the arch kernel package maintainers or just go to the kernel mailing list directly?

Last edited by Marichan (2025-09-01 23:20:31)

loqs · 2025-09-06 20:09:59

As gromit appears busy here is the next bisection kernel:

$ git bisect good
Bisecting: 2 revisions left to test after this (roughly 1 step)
[a2ec30065c3170376de38ac496c087fad1ccbd4b] wifi: iwlwifi: fix 6005N/SFF match
$ git describe 
v6.15-rc2-535-ga2ec30065c31

The kernel is available in Linux bisection 6.15 to 6.16.

gromit · 2025-09-06 20:20:47

Happy to help bisecting @loqs

loqs · 2025-09-06 20:25:41

gromit wrote:

Happy to help bisecting @loqs

Great to read. As you did not respond to my ping or https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … ote_314284 I assumed you were busy.

gromit · 2025-09-06 20:30:52

Yes I just got to that too ^_^

seth · 2025-09-06 21:20:45

@Marichan, can you please post a complete system journal covering the losses?

sudo journalctl -b | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st

Marichan · 2025-09-09 19:19:52

seth wrote:

@Marichan, can you please post a complete system journal covering the losses?
sudo journalctl -b | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st

Sorry, i was only monitoring the bug report in the arch gitlab, but I just saw your reply and since I was grabbing a log for the kernel bug report I thought I might as well share. https://0x0.st/Kqh6.txt

seth · 2025-09-09 19:35:24

Does this actually cover the issue?

Sep 02 20:20:31 ArchHome kernel: Linux version 6.15.0-rc7-1-mainline-01732-gfdb061195f53 (linux-mainline@archlinux) (gcc (GCC) 15.2.1 20250813, GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.45.0) #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed, 20 Aug 2025 13:08:51 +0000
Sep 02 20:20:34 ArchHome NetworkManager[876]: <info>  [1756837234.5795] manager: NetworkManager state is now CONNECTING
Sep 02 20:20:47 ArchHome NetworkManager[876]: <info>  [1756837247.2224] manager: NetworkManager state is now CONNECTED_SITE
Sep 02 20:20:53 ArchHome NetworkManager[876]: <info>  [1756837253.3338] manager: NetworkManager state is now CONNECTED_GLOBAL
Sep 02 21:37:03 ArchHome NetworkManager[876]: <info>  [1756841823.1900] manager: NetworkManager state is now CONNECTED_LOCAL
Sep 02 21:37:05 ArchHome systemd-journald[368]: Journal stopped

and there's no problem regarding iwlwifi showing up.

Huge red flag is that you're running wpa_supplicant and iwd at the same time, regardless of anything else, this is wrong.
In doubt you want to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Networ … Fi_backend

Arch Linux

#1 2025-09-01 21:59:36

Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 Acces point mode regression

#2 2025-09-06 20:09:59

Re: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 Acces point mode regression

#3 2025-09-06 20:20:47

Re: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 Acces point mode regression

#4 2025-09-06 20:25:41

Re: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 Acces point mode regression

#5 2025-09-06 20:30:52

Re: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 Acces point mode regression

#6 2025-09-06 21:20:45

Re: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 Acces point mode regression

#7 2025-09-09 19:19:52

Re: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 Acces point mode regression

#8 2025-09-09 19:35:24

Re: Intel Corporation Wireless 7260 Acces point mode regression

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