I've spent too much time troubleshooting IoT 2.4G disconnects from cheap IoT devices. I've enabled/disabled features such as 20/40Mhz channels and airtime fairness, changed channels, read everything there is to read about it on forums, re-flashed a hundred times to various stock and Merlin images and obviously sent my best regards to all software developers writing code for IoT thinking the client side is to blame.
I then found the culprit and all the problems magically went away.
Digging deep into my AX86U logs I found not one, not two but thousands of kernel wl0 errors. Whenever this happens, 2.4 Ghz clients disconnect and reconnect, but as you can imagine some just give up.
Most of the threads seem to imply this is related to a hardware issue, and Asus should replace it under warranty. But at least in my case, it was not a hw defect.
For clarity, logs look like this:
kernel: wl0: fatal error, reinitializing, total count of reinit's [10160]
kernel: CSIMON: CSIMON[1.1.0] Initialization
kernel: CSIMON: M2M usr already registered ...
Fix is switching your USB mode from USB 3.0 to USB 2.0. That's it. Behaviour is on Merlin and Asus firmware, so it's probably related to wl0 drivers.
You might ask yourself what's the USB Mode have to do with wl0 2.4 being up and stable? The answer as you can probably tell is I have no idea. But I've replicated this on other devices, and it's 100% related.
Might be something with DLNA, might be not - doesn't even matter, switch to USB 2.0 and your problems will go away if it's this bug.
I created an account just to post this, hoping I will save somebody the time that I personally wasted troubleshooting this behaviour.
I then found the culprit and all the problems magically went away.
Digging deep into my AX86U logs I found not one, not two but thousands of kernel wl0 errors. Whenever this happens, 2.4 Ghz clients disconnect and reconnect, but as you can imagine some just give up.
Most of the threads seem to imply this is related to a hardware issue, and Asus should replace it under warranty. But at least in my case, it was not a hw defect.
For clarity, logs look like this:
kernel: wl0: fatal error, reinitializing, total count of reinit's [10160]
kernel: CSIMON: CSIMON[1.1.0] Initialization
kernel: CSIMON: M2M usr already registered ...
Fix is switching your USB mode from USB 3.0 to USB 2.0. That's it. Behaviour is on Merlin and Asus firmware, so it's probably related to wl0 drivers.
You might ask yourself what's the USB Mode have to do with wl0 2.4 being up and stable? The answer as you can probably tell is I have no idea. But I've replicated this on other devices, and it's 100% related.
Might be something with DLNA, might be not - doesn't even matter, switch to USB 2.0 and your problems will go away if it's this bug.
I created an account just to post this, hoping I will save somebody the time that I personally wasted troubleshooting this behaviour.
