Okay before anyone gets up in arms for running Windows on the GabeCube It’s for 3D software that doesn’t work on Linux while I’m away from home.
With that out of the way…
I’m having a weird issue with the WiFi on it where the WiFi interface just disappears under load.
When I’m running a network task that sends/receives a lot of traffic (in this case using Spacedesk over WiFi to get additional display using a spare tablet & moonlight connected remotely to a system to grab assets), and the system is under heavy load (HIP compute, heavy RAM, CPU, GPU usage), the WiFi randomly falls flat on its face.
It’s also the same pattern too:
WiFi says it’s still connected but all network traffic drops
Interface still shows being alive but doesn’t show any WiFi networks anymore
Shortly after the interface fully disappears from Windows network manager
WiFi radio is still present in device manager with no errors reported from the driver
On reboot it shows as a brand new interface so the network device list is filled with several old WiFi interfaces that were historically connected
The Windows 11 install is also a Rufus “Windows to Go” installation on an external 512GB SSD Enclosure connected via USB C using 3.2 USB speeds.
This doesn’t appear to happen when running 10 hours long render that I ran today with GPU at 100% the whole time and CPU sitting at 60% utilization.
I’m not even sure where to begin to diagnose this or if the driver is just crap.
That’s a power supply issue, isn’t it? Maybe there’s a ‘enable powersaving for this device’ hidden somewhere that’s cutting it down, but maybe there’s insufficient actual power to keep the device computing and signaling over WiFi.
I’m sorry to say I don’t have a clear suggestion to diagnose this.
Sounds like a driver crash and driver recovery.
Crash, so traffic stops and hardware stops working. Driver restarts so when you go and check the driver says it is all normal because by that point it is running again. New interface since when driver restarted there were remnants of the old interface so it created a new entry for itself.
I did further tests and windows updates pulled down some updated (but not related) drivers. Doesn’t even matter how much traffic is flowing the drivers will eventually crash.
Now it’s performing proper driver recovery when the drivers die and recovers from between 15 seconds to 5 minutes.
Unfortunately it looks like it’s just very lackluster drivers and with Valve not offering Windows support and Qualcomm not releasing the drivers publicly otherwise, we are stuck on these bad drivers.
In a surprising (or unsurprising) turn of events, this issue appears to be caused by a dumb combo of recent Windows 11 update, WiFi 5 Dynamic Frequency Selection AND being very close to an Airport as I began to observe same behavior on my work laptop that has an Intel WiFi NIC during teams calls
Appears that when there’s a radar hit windows just freaks out and the driver crashes