Linux Intel WiFi driver broken with 5&6GHz bands for longer than three years

There was another Intel related issue with this laptop also; the gpu would freeze/panic intermittently, multiple times a day. This was "fixed" by adding a boot flag in grub to turn off a certain feature, and I think the ultimate fix may be working its way into the kernel currently.

Really not the slick experience I was hoping for with the XPS13. I mostly work on my desktop so it's not the end of the world, but it has me thinking about getting a mac in 5 or so years, assuming Asahi reaches stability.

It appears that this problem is related to Intel's WiFi firmware automatic detection of the regulatory domain, which is LAR. This is done on the basis of nearby access points, although the specifics of how this works is beyond me.

The problem is that if this gets detected incorrectly, there's no way to override. What the users in this bug report found that attempting to set the regulatory domain manually resulted in two separate regulatory domains being defined, which still left the 5 GHz channels disabled on their devices.

A workaround for this firmware issue, previously, was to disable LAR, which would force the card to use the manually set regulatory domain. But this option was removed from the kernel due to it causing other problems.

So I don't think this is (exclusively) a non-US issue, it's an issue for people who live in a place where nearby access points will teach the WiFi driver the wrong regulatory domain ... however that works. It's probably less common for this to happen in the US, but not impossible.

Partially contrary to the title, I would expect this problem to affect a relatively small number of users.

Edit: I found a great blog post talking about the issue in more detail, although it's from the point of view of hosting an AP on the device. https://tildearrow.org/?p=post&month=7&year=2022&item=lar

I had this on my Dell XPS13 (9310) as well, although in my case it was a few times a week, maybe .5 times a day. It also seemed to almost always trigger when kwin was animating something, particularly switching to another virtual desktop, but never when playing any games. I can't imagine why, but the problem mostly went away when I turned off all animations in kwin, and seems to have gone away completely sometime about a year or so ago.

All in all, it's still a better experience than the Macbook Air I was using prior to having this XPS13... That damn Macbook loved to vomit onto the screen and lock up without warning. No dust, thermals seemed fine, battery was healthy... no clue what was wrong with it. And without many exposed settings to fiddle with.