Bug 1946450 - Bluetooth audio broken on Intel wifi cards
Summary: Bluetooth audio broken on Intel wifi cards
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NEXTRELEASE
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: linux-firmware
Version: 33
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: David Woodhouse
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2021-04-06 07:20 UTC by Raphael
Modified: 2021-05-02 13:28 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: ---
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2021-05-02 13:27:36 UTC
Type: Bug


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Raphael 2021-04-06 07:20:39 UTC
Description of problem:

For weeks bluetooth audio devices are broken on Intel wifi cards like my AX200.
What happens: 
At some point, the sound will stop playing and after ~10-20 seconds, it will reconnect. If there are other bluetooth device connected like mice, they will also be interrupted for that time. This happens only with bluetooth headset/speakers. A mouse by itself does not cause it.

This can happen several times an hour, once an hour or sometimes it can take a day until it happens. The issue was also reported on several other online forums, like this arch thread, which is the most active on this issue: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=263040&p=3

Users there suggest that it might be due to linux-firmware update and/or a combination of that and bluez. The last working linux-firmware version is supposed to be 20201120.

This problem persists for several weeks with different versions and kernels but here are the current non-working versions:

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

linux-firmware: 20210315-119.fc33
bluez: 5.56-1
kernel: 5.11.11-200.fc33.x86_64


How reproducible:

All it needs to take is connecting a bluetooth headset or speaker and wait until it hangs and disconnects. As said this can take a while, maybe due to a race condition.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Connect bluetooth headset/speaker
2. Play
3. Wait

Actual results:
At random times, all bluetooth devices stop working for maybe 20 seconds and then reconnect.

Expected results:
No random hang and reconnect.

Additional info:
I posted more diagnostics here: https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/bluetooth-devices-disconnect-and-reconnect-right-after-several-times-a-day/12400

But I think most of this is useless. 
The only diagnostics that seems to be consistent is this: 

Feb 17 12:24:04 pc bluetoothd[1849]: src/profile.c:ext_io_disconnected() Unable to get io data for Headset Voice gateway: getp>


I know that this is maybe a problem in linux-firmware or bluez but it happens in Fedora and there is no access to the former project to actually report and track this issue.

Comment 1 Marco Schmidt 2021-04-06 08:48:11 UTC
Can confirm, the problem persists on F34 beta. Disconnection happen due to timeouts, see here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1929434
Reverting the firmware as a workaround seems to fix it for me, at least I didn't encounter any new disconnects since.

I also opened a thread in the Intel wireless support forum, but Linux support is pretty basic. I really hope their devs take the time to analyze it. But I guess that's up to us endusers. Any recommendations how to debug the firmware?

Comment 2 Raphael 2021-05-02 13:27:36 UTC
Manually replacing Intel firmware files from [0] fixed it for me.

Lets hope this makes it into the Fedora releases soon.

[0]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/log/


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