Wi-Fi Performance Issues with Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 on Rocky Linux 10

[G1llus]

Hello everyone,

I’m experiencing persistent Wi-Fi performance issues on my Rocky Linux 10 installation with an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 adapter. While other devices on the same network work fine, my Rocky Linux system consistently shows low signal strength and slow speeds.
Details:

Wi-Fi Adapter: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201
Current Signal Strength: Approximately -87 dBm
RX Bitrate: 19.5 MBit/s
TX Bitrate: 26.0 MBit/s
Driver in Use: iwlwifi
Kernel Version: 6.12.0-55.27.1.el10_0.x86_64

Troubleshooting Steps Taken: (with duck.ai)

Verified that the adapter is recognized and initialized correctly.
Disabled power management settings.
Adjusted MTU settings to 1400 bytes.
Added various options to the iwlwifi driver configuration.
Checked for firmware updates, but none were available.

Logs:

I have noticed repeated messages in the logs indicating “Unhandled alg: 0x703,” which may be related to the performance issues.

I would appreciate any insights or suggestions on how to resolve this issue. Thank you!

[jbkt23]

Unless your speed tool is mis representing bits as bytes I’d say your connection is pretty fast. Most ISP’s represent the transmission speed in bits. So for example on my router the rx rate is displayed as 300 Mb/s, little “b” is bits and there are 8 bits to a byte. So interpolating that’s 37 MB/s. Now an actual speed test on the router says I’m only getting 139 Mb/s rx rate. These speeds vary by time of day due to traffic and other issues like the distance from your wifi router which effects transmission quality and thus the speed.
The error message needs context for us to understand what it is related too.

[iwalker]

A good command to use:

iw dev wlp0s20f3 link
Connected to xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (on wlp0s20f3)
	SSID: WLAN
	freq: 5240.0
	RX: 3331716744 bytes (2803642 packets)
	TX: 230813795 bytes (588693 packets)
	signal: -39 dBm
	rx bitrate: 1200.9 MBit/s 80MHz HE-MCS 11 HE-NSS 2 HE-GI 0 HE-DCM 0
	tx bitrate: 1200.9 MBit/s 80MHz HE-MCS 11 HE-NSS 2 HE-GI 0 HE-DCM 0
	bss flags: short-slot-time
	dtim period: 1
	beacon int: 100

You will need the iw package installed to run that. The above was run as root, otherwise use sudo along with it.

Even in previous kernels and also depending on the WIFI I’ve been connecting to also affected speed. For example in the office I got 5GHz, but at home it would never connect at 5GHz, only 2.4GHz. Only when I got a newer 6.x kernel recently in Fedora 42 did I finally manage at home to get 5GHz.

If the default kernel in RL10 is not enough, you may need to enable elrepo repository and install kernel-ml package to get a newer kernel that may support your wifi card better.