WIFI Dropping Constsitently with OSMC and RPi3

Help and Support
21

Hi Sam

Was going through the changelog of OSMC and found the following for the December/Xmas update

Improved WiFi performance by reducing background scanning under certain environmental conditions

Could this have any impact here?

22

See below

23

I got myself a USB keyboard to check out locally what is going on. What I see is that in the OSMC app the wifi scanning stops working, no other networks are shown.

The connected wifi is still there (at this point OSMC/Kodi still believes it is connected) but it is not functioning. When disconnecting the network it disappears (not selecting forget obviously). No SSIDs appear in the list anymore.
Disabling and enabling the wireless interface and still no SSIDs are found. It does seem like a WiFi driver issue to me. Is there any logs I can access from within Kodi?

Googling a bit, this seems interesting as well: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/1342

24

Without logs to accompany the symptoms you are reporting at any given time, your report is pretty useless… Also, power management is already off in OSMC by default.

25

Fair enough, if it happens again I will post the logs here. So far for some reason it seems to work fine this evening after rebooting the Pi.

26

Thanks… It’s just nearly impossible to provide any relevant support without relevant data points to compare against other users with similar issues and to check for proper configuration or other use case conditions.

27

It happened again while I was streaming video from Kodi/rPi3 to my Android tablet using Yatse.

Exiting Kodi and using ifconfig to down and up the wlan0 interface did not help. The interface did not connect to the wifi network when brought up again.

I did a grab-logs -A for you.

Around the (almost) exact time the wifi went down, in the log I find

Jan 10 20:29:05 SkyPi3 kernel: brcmfmac: brcmf_sdio_hostmail: Unknown mailbox data content: 0x40012

I see in the log there is an error when I’m manually bringing down and up the wlan0 interface:

Jan 10 20:32:49 SkyPi3 kernel: brcmfmac: _brcmf_set_multicast_list: Setting mcast_list failed, -52
Jan 10 20:32:51 SkyPi3 kernel: brcmfmac: _brcmf_set_multicast_list: Setting allmulti failed, -52
Jan 10 20:32:53 SkyPi3 kernel: brcmfmac: _brcmf_set_multicast_list: Setting BRCMF_C_SET_PROMISC failed, -52
Jan 10 20:33:00 SkyPi3 kernel: brcmfmac: brcmf_do_escan: error (-52)
Jan 10 20:33:00 SkyPi3 kernel: brcmfmac: brcmf_cfg80211_scan: scan error (-52)
28

Please don’t PM logs. Use our pastebin and provide the link in forum. I’m not a dev, I’m a moderator with many years experience here. There are others that may be of more help when they can see something in the logs that I may miss.

29

Fair enough, I did not know about the paste-log functionality before googling.

Here is a complete log: http://paste.osmc.io/wuvoferoka

See my previous post for the wifi related loglines.

30

How is the USB hard drive that you have connected powered? How is the pi powered?

31

The setup has not changed in over a year. The external harddrives and the Pi are powered by their own power adapters.

32

And hardware degrades, and improved updates sometimes demand more performance from the Pi resulting in more demand for power. So my second question is still relevant.

Since there is evidence of the drive disconn/reconn’ing, it’s seems likely there is a power problem. When power demands are not met, the USB bus takes the hit before the CPU/system does. This would probably also include network instability when sufficient power is not available.

33

With your feedback I changed the power adapter for the Pi which was 1.2A with another adapter that outputs 2A.

Let’s see if that helps. Which lines in the log are you referring to for the usb dis/reconnecting so I know what to look for in case it happens again.

34

Wow, it’s almost certainly going to be the issue. An Rpi3 recommends a minimum of 2.5A.

It was the repeating of runs of these kernel: sd lines that I saw.

Jan 10 17:35:55 SkyPi3 kernel:  sdb: sdb1
Jan 10 17:35:55 SkyPi3 kernel: sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
Jan 10 17:35:56 SkyPi3 kernel: sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 UNKNOWN(0x2003) Result: hostbyte=0x07 driverbyte=0x08
Jan 10 17:35:56 SkyPi3 kernel: sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 Sense Key : 0x4 [current] [descriptor] 
Jan 10 17:35:56 SkyPi3 kernel: sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 ASC=0x0 ASCQ=0x0 
Jan 10 17:35:56 SkyPi3 kernel: sd 1:0:0:0: [sdb] tag#0 CDB: opcode=0x85 85 06 20 00 05 00 fe 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 ef 00
Jan 10 17:35:56 SkyPi3 udisks-glue[319]: Device file /dev/sdb inserted
35

Thanks for the help, switching to a more powerful adapter seems to have done the trick.

Curious why OSMC December seems to be drawing more current than the October and earlier versions. Not that I care but always interesting to know.

36

This behavior has been seen on occasion throughout the lifespan of OSMC as well as it predecessor Raspbmc. Also, there’s no way to prove that your powersupply is still outputting the same spec as it did when new. Hardware degrades over time.

37

Your power supply may have also degraded in this time.
I’m not aware of changes in Oct -> Dec that increased PSU load.

38

Happened again just now, here’s the log: http://paste.osmc.io/kerijizoha

I never see the power indicator in OSMC/Kodi though.

Any ideas?

39

We need complete logs sir!

40

I will update my situation. First I have gone to a wired connection and disabled the WIFI. Better performance all the way around.

As I thought about this some more, I remembered that around the time this began I had also installed a HIFI Berry Pi Hat. Perhaps it drew just enough power to cut out the WIFI?