Arch Linux

lger0

Member

Registered: 2024-10-10

Posts: 8

Thinkpad T480 Wifi breaks on lid close

When I close the lid, wifi stops working.
This expresses itself as:
ping returning "Temporary failure in name resolution"
nmcli device wifi list returning an empty list
ip link listing the wifi card as "state DOWN"
"ip link set dev wlp3s0 up" doesn't result in a visible state change.
Once the wifi is borked, rebooting doesn't fix it.

This issue has been keeping me up for two days because it behaves in ways that seem erratic to me. I have not been able to consistently reproduce any behavior apart from what is written above.

Sometimes, briefly connecting and disconnecting the laptop to via LAN makes wifi work again. Although I can't consistently reproduce this, so maybe it's just coinciding with something else.

While wifi is working,
"nmcli device wifi list" displays the network I'm connected to at that moment
ping reaches addresses on the internet as expected
ip link lists the wifi card as "state UP".

When booting into Windows 11, the wifi behaves slightly strange. Sometimes it doesn't find any devices while scanning or briefly displays devices which instantly disappear only to reappear after a minute. But this issue usually seems to fix itself after a few minutes.

I have a gut feeling this may be a combination of 2 unknown issues.
1 hardware related issue causing weirdness in windows 11, and 1 misconfiguration in archlinux causing extra weirdness along with the hardware problem. Of course I am sincerely hoping to be wrong about the hardware issue.

How can I further narrow down what exactly is breaking my wifi?
Edit: I am aware that there are already several posts with vaguely similar symptoms to mine and I have tried applying some of their solutions (to no avail). However, what I'm hoping to get out of this post is some guidance on how to systematically determine the cause of my issue instead of blindly throwing solutions at it because other forum posts suggested them.

Last edited by lger0 (2024-10-10 15:45:30)

lger0

Member

Registered: 2024-10-10

Posts: 8

Re: Thinkpad T480 Wifi breaks on lid close

Here's my journal: http://0x0.st/X6Pm.txt
dmesg: http://0x0.st/X6PB.txt