WiFi was working fine on sys-net based on Debian 13 and it stopped working two or three updates ago, about last week.
Now Network Manager doesn’t show any wifi networks.
My laptop is a NitroPad from Nitrokey.
Any idea how to debug this?
Try switching the sys-net kernel to a previous version, probably still installed. See if that fixes it. You can do it through Qube Manager.
Thank you! That works! Wifi on Debian 13 is working with Linux kernel 6.15.10-1.fc37.
Should I report this as a bug somewhere?
When should I switch back to use the default/latest kernel?
You can rely on Qubes Update not removing the older working kernel as long as it stays assigned to a VM, so you can stick with it until the issue is hopefully fixed in a later kernel.
If you want to help troubleshoot the next step would be to temporarily switch back to the broken kernel, restart sys-net, and look at the output of journalctl -b (run as root, not user) in sys-net. Probably you’re looking for error logging related to wifi- your likely keyword in the long boot log.
Sounds like you’re running Qubes certified hardware so perhaps other people here will run into the same issue.
I’m not sure that this would be a bug. The same thing happened to my laptop that has an Intel BE200 with the dom0 update from last week.
In my case the problem was that the driver in the new qubes kernel requires a firmware blob that is not present in Debian 13:
user@sys-net:~$ sudo journalctl -b | grep -i iwlwifi
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: Detected crf-id 0x2001910, cnv-id 0x2001910 wfpm id 0x80000000
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: PCI dev 272b/00f4, rev=0x472, rfid=0x112200
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: Detected Intel(R) Wi-Fi 7 BE200 320MHz
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-102.ucode failed with error -2
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-101.ucode failed with error -2
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-100.ucode failed with error -2
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-99.ucode failed with error -2
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-98.ucode failed with error -2
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: no suitable firmware found!
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: minimum version required: iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-98
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: maximum version supported: iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-102
Dec 11 17:09:03 sys-net kernel: iwlwifi 0000:00:07.0: check git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git
I solved it installing the firmware-iwlwifi package from debian sid on my debian-13-xfce template (luckily there were no dependency problems with that).
1 Like
By the way, another solution is to change the template of sys-net to a recent enough Fedora [*] (Fedora tends to update packages more often than Debian Stable).
However, I prefer Debian, that’s why I solved it that way.
[*] Switching an AppVM template from one distro to a different one could have unintended consequences, one should do a backup before attempting that.
Thank you. You just gave me the idea of installing firmware-iwlwifi from Debian Forky (the testing version at the moment) using apt pinning.
Specifically, I add this to /etc/apt/preferences so packages from testing are installed only if I specifically say so:
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: -1
Package: *
Pin: release a=forky
Pin-Priority: -1
And I run this:
sudo apt install firmware-iwlwifi/forky
1 Like