Comment 0 for bug 1743279

After upgrading to the 4.13 kernel on Ubuntu 16.04.3, I've noticed my WiFi would stop working after every 20 minutes or so. The problem initially seems related to some DNS services crashing because of what happend in browsers and other software that usually rely on DNS but I've noticed I couldn't ping my router and other local devices for which I knew the IP addresses. The connection is still presented as being connected, but it just doesn't work.

After googling a lot, I came across this question on askubuntu.com

https://askubuntu.com/questions/967355/wifi-unstable-after-17-10-update

While led me to this bug report on Debian's bug tracker:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=879184

Which led me to this bug in upstream:

http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/ath10k/2017-September/010088.html

I've tested the proposed fixes myself and I can confirm they work.

What causes the WiFi to stop working is a bug related to the group rekeying routines. Updating the board-2.bin and firmware-6.bin from kvalo's git repository for version RM4.4.1 has worked for me and for other users as well.

It seems it only happend in >4.12 kernels, hence why I've only had problems after 4.13 was pushed as the current rolling HWE kernel for 16.04.3.

The files were fetched from https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware as of this date, as of commit 35d8642f452827b955470de4ac997ffe906a6f17, with the following sha256 sums:

8fcc6b96c1895bc227c3caf0bd04b23d0292f8f919e819e4e025e29ef4b44d8e board-2.bin
30fc3db3af9ba9f3b88e523fe39b715826a31738d48ca01a3fad0d14f7e46e20 firmware-6.bin_WLAN.RM.4.4.1-00065-QCARMSWP-1

It seems firmware-6.bin_WLAN.RM.4.4.1-00079-QCARMSWPZ-1 (sha256sum 5554d6aa0de07394938a0094bae725ed24d4ceee3b38c849b4099a496ec50b48) works as well.

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Description: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS
Release: 16.04

linux-firmware:
  Instalado: 1.157.14
  Candidato: 1.157.14
  Tabela de versão:
 *** 1.157.14 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main i386 Packages
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.157 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main i386 Packages