Thank you so much for your response Mr. Sperling.

As an update, I have been both restarting and power cycling my computer
repeatedly today and my Wi-Fi has been fluctuating between working and not
working, sometimes while I am using it (i.e. without rebooting). And every time
it dies, it consistently prints "unhandled firmware response 0x5f4/0x2000000c".

> When 40MHz wide channels were added with the 802.11n standard, a
> provision was included which allows any device to prevent use of
> 40MHz channels in its vicinity. This is done by setting the
> "40MHz intolerant" flag in advertised 802.11n capabilities.
> Conforming devices are supposed to stop using 40MHz channels if a frame
> is received which contains this flag. Intel firmware seems to be keen
> on enforcing this by refusing to work if the driver does not comply.

Does the "40MHz intolerant" flag apply to 5GHz networks? My router has both
2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, and I am connected to the 5GHz one (although some
devices in my house are connected to the 2.4GHz network).

Thanks again,
Jeremy

------- Original Message -------
On Tuesday, December 27th, 2022 at 12:57 PM, Stefan Sperling <[email protected]> 
wrote:


> On Tue, Dec 27, 2022 at 06:50:55PM +0000, Jeremy Potter wrote:
> 
> > One clue that I do have is that every time I restarted my Wi-Fi, the kernel 
> > log
> > printed something along the lines of:
> > 
> > iwx0: unhandled firmware response 0x5f4/0x2000000c
> 
> 
> Response 0x5f4 is a "monitor notification" sent by firmware.
> This seems to be related to 40MHz-intolerance detection.
> The Linux driver forces a switch to 20MHz channel width when this
> event occurs, if I understand their code correctly.
> 
> When 40MHz wide channels were added with the 802.11n standard, a
> provision was included which allows any device to prevent use of
> 40MHz channels in its vicinity. This is done by setting the
> "40MHz intolerant" flag in advertised 802.11n capabilities.
> Conforming devices are supposed to stop using 40MHz channels if a frame
> is received which contains this flag. Intel firmware seems to be keen
> on enforcing this by refusing to work if the driver does not comply.
> 
> The OpenBSD driver does not handle this notification yet.
> I was hoping that relying on the AP to switch 40MHz channels off would
> be good enough, but apparently it is not. To make our driver handle this
> situation gracefully we would have to disable our use of 40MHz (and 80MHz)
> channels if firmware reports this event, and somehow decide to turn wide
> channels back on later (or stay stuck on 20MHz width until the next reboot,
> which is a huge performance hit).
> 
> Given the information above, are you able to reproduce this problem?
> Is there a device under your control which is causing it? I do not have a
> test setup for this issue, though I could probably set something up by
> setting the 40MHz-intolerant bit artificially in one of my APs.
> But if you were able to easily verify a patch which attempts to address
> this, that would save me some time.

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