Solution to my Thinkpad E16 Wi-Fi Woes
Solution to my Thinkpad E16 Wi-Fi Woes
The 6.1 OEM kernel contains backported (from 6.2) support for the RTL8852BE wireless adapter. This has worked fine on my laptop since the support was backported. The latest release, 6.1.0.9-1009 is causing my adapter to occasionally stop working completely. The WiFi disconnects, and GNOME tells me...
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I managed to fix the one biggest gripe about my Thinkpad E16: the RTL8852BE Wi-Fi controller randomly dropping out. I actually found this a few days ago, but I had forgotten where I put the file I had edited. You put a file in modprobe.d called 70-rtw89.conf. Both /etc/modprobe.d/ and /usr/lib/modprobe.d work - I used the latter, but for the sake of conventions, you should probably use the former.
You then put in these options for the rtw89 module: options rtw89_pci disable_clkreq=y disable_aspm_l1=y disable_aspm_l1ss=y
Now, my Thinkpad is a fully functional Linux laptop. I will be docking it to an 8 from my initial score of 8.5, but I'm back to liking it for now. If you apply the fix, be sure to update the firmware as well - some older distros have an old version that works but returns a lot of journalctl error on this card.
Update: What do you know! The updated firmware-realtek just went into backports!
Thanks, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-oem-6.1/+bug/2017277
I have P14s. I simply replaced the wifi card with an Intel AX200. Problem solved!
A lot of the modern thinkpads have the wifi module soldered to the motherboard nowadays unfortunately. Sad that they would use these crappy realtek cards in the first place as well.
According to the repair manual, my Wi-Fi card is actually replaceable, at least physically. I don’t know if Lenovo still does BIOS whitelists of cards like they used to (I think they did remove it a few years back.), but their OEM parts website has a diverse selection if this fix were ever to break.
I’d say other than the bottom being a bother to remove (and the keyboard not being designed to be replaced, though after some research, it seems possible), this is a surprisingly repairable laptop for how recent it it. It has dual SSD bays and a DIMM slot.