pacman -Syu on rAudio-64bit-20240615.img breaks WiFi

[markblinkhorn]

Today I ran pacman -Syu on a R-Pi 3B+ that was running rAudio 20240719 in a WiFi only environment. It did not re-appear on the network after a reboot (Wired LAN does still work, as I discovered after some experimentation). In an attempt to isolate the issue I made a new SD with the 64bit 20240615 release and brought it up on the WiFi network, I connected using SSH and ran pacman -Syu. It downloaded and installed around 250 updates with no errors. But on reboot it did not reconnect to WiFi.

There is something in the latest aarch that seems to break wifi - I did notice some messages stating that some iwconfig commands no longer work and should be replaced but haven't fully investigated this yet.

[markblinkhorn]

additional info:

brcmfmac: brcmf_set_channel: set chanspec 0xd0...fail, reason -52

[markblinkhorn]

Seems like a workaround might be available here https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/148665/raspberry-pi4-arch-linux-wifi-fail-brcmfmac-issue which has the following text

If works, make a file to load the module with that option at /etc/modprobe.d/brcmfmac.conf with:

options brcmfmac feature_disable=0x82000

See also raspberrypi/linux#6049 for further discussion

[markblinkhorn]

Recent update here: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/6049#issuecomment-2485431104 reads like a definitive answer to the problem. I have modified the troublesome R-Pi using the new suggestion (feature_disable=0x200000) which, so far, seems to work.