I run Linux on my laptop, and I’ve had some problems with the wifi intermittently dropping out. I think I’ve found the solution to this, so I just wanted to record it here so I don’t forget, and in case anyone else finds it useful.
What I found was that any time the wifi was idle for too long it just stopped working and the connection needed to be manually restarted. Worse, after a while even that didn’t work and I had to reboot to fix it.
The problem seems to be with the power-saving features of the wifi card, which is identified by lspci as:
01:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
What appears to happen is that the card goes into power-saving mode, goes to sleep and never wakes up again.
It makes use of the rtl8723be driver, and the solution appears to be to disable the power-saving features by passing some parameters to the relevant kernel module. You can do this by passing the parameters on the command line if manually loading the module with modprobe, but the easiest thing is to create a file in /etc/modprobe.d (which can be called anything) with the following contents:
# Prevents the WiFi card from automatically sleeping and halting connection
options rtl8723be fwlps=0 swlps=0
This seems to be working for me now. It’s possible that only one out of the parameters fwlps and swlps are needed, but I haven’t had chance to test this yet.
The following pages helped me figure this out: