Any advice on where to go from here? This console was running dmesg -w to try and catch an intermittent crash… And this is what I got. I am using an el cheapo USB wifi adapter that I’m suspicious of.

Everything was working fine until I rebuilt nixos with Nvidia support… Now my old generations of the OS are crashing after a few minutes (display on, no response to input, keyboard lights don’t respond, SysRq doesn’t work)

  • @Sorcaeden
    12•11 months ago

    I don’t pretend to be an expert in this, and I also have no idea what the state machine looks like for unauthenticated WiFi, but my thinking on the call stack is either you were authenticated and the association with the AP dropped while sending a frame and puked, or it kicked it while attempting to authenticate to an AP, and I have no idea why a mutex would be taken, or to what, but it timed out apparently.

    So why would this happen after a rebuild?

    1. freak accident/timing thing.

    2. I see multiple mt## modules loaded, and I’m suspecting while not looking it up that they are operating a MediaTek chip in that dongle, and are potentially conflicting.

    3. lots of wifi devices I’ve seen recently have loaded firmware separately from driver from /use/lib(or lib64)/firmware and the version changed from before, and maybe needs updating now or you did it before or whatever.

    I agree with others - I’d give you a fiver if it happens again without the adapter connected.

    • @mvirtsOP
      3•11 months ago

      I think You’re right, it is a mediatek chip and I used to add the USB device id manually to load the module, but with nixos 23.11 it started working automatically. I’m also running a preemptable kernel… Probably related now that I think about it :P

      I should track down the firmware, that was one of the things I was looking into when setting up the device id hack.

      I think this happened once before after uptime of about a week… But I didn’t get any information from that crash. Also, I’m remembering that some configurations were failing to see this wifi device and falling back to wired so maybe this has been a hidden problem since the new nixos release…

      Thanks to everyone for your thoughts, it’s very helpful.