Score:0

Wi-Fi repeatedly enabled/disabled by radio killswitch

gh flag

Basically what it says in the title. After some time of being connected to WiFi, my WiFi will start disconnecting and reconnecting about every 5 seconds. rfkill shows that the WiFi interface is blocked at the hardware level when the WiFi is disconnected. /var/log/syslog shows NetworkManager saying that "Wi-Fi is now disabled by the radio killswitch" and then "Wi-Fi is now enabled by the radio killswitch" over and over. My digging into this suggests that this should be related to an actual physical button on my laptop to disable WiFi. But it seems like something is going haywire and triggering this button to fire constantly.

I can't find anything online about this specific issue... just people that can't connect because their WiFi is always disabled or something.

Has anybody run into this? Any suggestions on how I might diagnose further? Is there a possible workaround? I never use the WiFi killswitch on my laptop (if it even has one?) so I'd be OK just disabling the killswitch functionality entirely. Can I just safely stop the rfkill service?

This is Ubuntu 20.10 on a System76 Lemur Pro (intel WiFi). I've installed all available updates. Issue happens on multiple networks (home, work, etc.) so computer seems to be the culprit.

chili555 avatar
cn flag
I believe that F11, the key with the airplane on it, is the kill switch. Airplane Mode equals rfkill. I wonder if the button is failing.
John Chrysostom avatar
gh flag
Yeah, I have no idea... but that would certainly explain the symptoms.
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