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Intel Woes
November 28th, 2020
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My wife and I own computers that have an Intel wireless card in them.  My
wife's computer is a laptop and mine is a desktop.  Within the past year, we've
had impactful bugs hit both computers that have caused wireless QoL to be
severely degraded.

In my wife's example, the wireless driver simply fails to load with an
ambiguous status code.  Enough sleuthing around online shows that many other
people have hit this bug which remained open up to the last time I checked a
month ago.  This particular fix was a major regression and for some reason a
fix wasn't easily backportable to earlier GNU/Linux kernel versions.  I've
tried compiling custom forks of mainline Ubuntu kernels with iwlwifi patches to
no avail.  Something is so seriously wrong that reverting back to even a 3.x
kernel version doesn't fix the issue.  She's been forced to use a USB wifi card
which works reliably through kernel updates but sticks out from a laptop and is
asking to be snapped off.

The bug I experience on my desktop is much more sneaky.  I will have
intermittent network drops as my card disconnects and reconnects after a couple
of seconds.  I notice this much more when playing real time online games as it
usually results in a server disconnect or in a loss of about 20 seconds or so
of game time for more forgiving game network code.  I am on Wi-Fi, but the
router is in the room right below where the desktop is kept; it's probably no
more than 10 feet away with a floor in between.

For my desktop computer, I can easily run some stats on my bug because it has
an easy to grep message of the number of times in a particular day that this
issue has affected me, sorted by the highest total number of occurrences in a
day.

$ sudo journalctl | grep "No beacon heard" | cut -c 1-6 | uniq -c | sort -h -r

    372 Jul 19
    277 Jul 16
    224 Jul 18
    198 Jun 27
    163 Aug 08
    140 Jul 15
    131 Jun 29
    106 Feb 02
    100 Jun 28
     99 Jul 01
     91 Feb 01
     83 Nov 28
     78 Mar 22
     69 Mar 21
     62 Nov 27
     62 Jul 02
     61 Nov 14
     61 Jul 11
     60 May 24
     53 Jul 13
     53 Jan 22
     51 Sep 13
     50 Aug 11
     48 Aug 09
     47 Jul 12
     45 Jan 24
     43 Nov 15
     41 Jun 05
     41 Jul 10
     40 Jan 17
     39 Jul 20
     39 Jul 06
     36 May 28
     36 Feb 03
     35 Jul 05
     35 Feb 23
     35 Aug 07
     34 Jul 04
     33 Sep 27
     33 Jul 17
     32 Aug 04
     31 Feb 04
     30 Mar 27
     29 Nov 16
     29 Nov 11
     28 Nov 23
     28 Nov 20
     28 May 25
     28 Jul 08
     28 Aug 05
     27 May 23
     24 Mar 30
     23 Feb 24
     22 Nov 26
     22 May 27
     21 May 22
     21 Jul 07
     20 Sep 12
     20 Nov 12
     19 Mar 29
     18 Aug 06
     17 Aug 12
     16 Nov 22
     16 Mar 20
     15 Jun 07
     15 Aug 13
     14 Oct 26
     13 Aug 10
     12 Nov 19
     12 Jul 03
     12 Jan 15
     12 Feb 09
     11 Sep 28
     11 Sep 26
     11 Nov 17
     10 Sep 24
     10 Nov 26
     10 May 31
      9 Oct 29
      8 Jun 01
      7 May 26
      7 Mar 04
      7 Feb 22
      6 Oct 08
      6 Mar 28
      6 Jul 09
      6 Jan 09
      6 Aug 14
      5 Mar 15
      5 Mar 08
      5 Jun 16
      5 Jan 29
      5 Jan 23
      5 Jan 12
      5 Feb 21
      5 Feb 16
      4 Oct 28
      4 Nov 13
      4 May 02
      4 Mar 01
      4 Jun 11
      4 Jan 26
      4 Jan 11
      4 Dec 01
      3 Sep 25
      3 Oct 22
      3 Oct 20
      3 Nov 07
      3 Mar 14
      3 Mar 07
      3 Jun 26
      3 Jul 26
      3 Jan 30
      3 Jan 14
      3 Jan 04
      3 Jan 02
      3 Feb 18
      3 Feb 17
      3 Feb 08
      3 Apr 29
      2 Oct 25
      2 Oct 09
      2 Oct 03
      2 Nov 20
      2 May 16
      2 Mar 16
      2 Jan 06
      2 Feb 28
      2 Dec 06
      2 Apr 26
      2 Apr 11
      2 Apr 10
      1 Oct 24
      1 Oct 23
      1 Oct 19
      1 Oct 03
      1 Nov 19
      1 Nov 17
      1 May 03
      1 Jul 14
      1 Jan 13
      1 Jan 05
      1 Feb 29
      1 Feb 14
      1 Dec 07
      1 Aug 02
      1 Apr 09

Seeing the bug tracker is even worse -- bugs that have been open for more than
a year with little follow-up from the developer's side.  Most of these bug
trackers are filled with people discussing hacks as workarounds when nothing is
being done.  Both of the open bugs affecting my wife and I are regressions to
existing functionality; both of us were plagued with these bugs after kernel
updates.  It makes me wonder what sort of testing (if any) that Intel is doing
with their GNU/Linux drivers.  Is there something that can be done to help?

I'm usually not perterbed when it comes to hardware and Linux capability but
running into these issues will make me very cautious about buying laptops or
components that include Intel technology in the future.  I've had my fair share
of issues with Realtek-based wireless chipsets as well, but those bugs seem to
be patched more easily and readily than anything Intel puts out.