Wi-Fi dropouts on Fedora 44 with Realtek RTL8852BE (rtw89)

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1

Hi,

I am seeing repeated Wi-Fi dropouts on Fedora 44 and I would appreciate any feedback or similar experiences from other users.

Problem

  • The Wi-Fi icon stays active and the system reports it is connected.
  • Web browsing stops and I cannot reach the machine from other hosts on the LAN.
  • Toggling Wi-Fi off and back on restores connectivity for a while.
  • The issue then repeats.

Hardware / software

  • Machine: Lenovo ThinkCentre M75q Gen 5
  • OS: Fedora Linux 44 Workstation Edition
  • Kernel: 7.1.3-201.fc44.x86_64
  • Wi-Fi adapter: Realtek RTL8852BE PCIe
  • Driver: rtw89_8852be
  • Firmware: rtw89/rtw8852b_fw-2.bin, version 0.29.29.18
  • AP: Fritz!Box, 5 GHz, channel 108

What I have checked

  • Signal quality: strong, about -44 dBm, link rate 866 Mbps.
  • Error counters: no TX failures, no beacon loss, no CRC/hardware errors.
  • PCIe bus: no AER corrected or uncorrectable errors.
  • Logs: the disconnects are locally generated, not AP-driven:
wlp4s0: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=... reason=3 locally_generated=1
wlp4s0: deauthenticating from ... by local choice (Reason: 3=DEAUTH_LEAVING)
  • Ping test: I pinged a local Pi-hole (IPv6) every 60 seconds. Most pings succeed, but during the outages the machine itself returns:
From thinkcentre.fritz.box (...): icmp_seq=... Destination unreachable: Address unreachable

This confirms the loss is at the network layer, not just DNS or an application issue.

  • Power save: iw dev wlp4s0 get power_save reports on.

What I suspect

This looks like the known rtw89 / RTL8852BE driver/firmware instability, possibly triggered by power management. I have not seen a hardware error in the logs.

Questions

  1. Has anyone else hit this exact pattern on Fedora 44 with rtw89_8852be?
  2. Did disabling power save fix it for you? Which method worked best?
    • sudo iw dev wlp4s0 set power_save off
    • options rtw89_core disable_ps_mode=1 in /etc/modprobe.d/rtw89.conf
  3. Was disabling PCIe ASPM necessary?
    • options rtw89_pci disable_aspm_l1=1 disable_aspm_l1ss=1 disable_clkreq=1
  4. Did a newer kernel or linux-firmware update solve it?
  5. Are there any other commands or logs I should collect to confirm whether this is a driver bug or a failing card?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Quick commands I have used

# Driver / adapter info
lspci -k | grep -A3 -i network
iw dev wlp4s0 link
iw dev wlp4s0 get power_save
ip -s link show wlp4s0

# Relevant logs
journalctl -u NetworkManager -b --no-pager -n 300
journalctl -u wpa_supplicant -b --no-pager -n 200
journalctl -k --grep='wlp4s0' --no-pager -n 400
journalctl -k --grep='AER' --no-pager

Ping log can be found here: PING pihole.fritz.box (2003:ca:1f1a:5900:c1ca:446c:2b7f:cf94) 56 data bytes[17 - Pastebin.com

This behavior is new and happens for around 2 weeks.

2

Upstream is working on support for 7.1 kernels: https://github.com/morrownr/rtw89/issues/112, but it takes time to get new drivers into distros. If you don’t want to build a driver from source, you could switch to an Intel WiFi card or USB dongle.

3

Thank you! Good to know!

4

There are many many topics on this forum about similar issues. A search for Realtek RTL8852BE will show them.

I suggest to either wait for a suitable driver or replace that adapter with one that is currently fully supported. Even an inexpensive usb wifi dongle that contains a chipset supported in linux should function while waiting for an updated driver.

5

You can check out my post. I had the same problem and fixed it by disabling d3cold :