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possiblylinux127

Why are there sound glitches with Bluetooth audio in Linux when the BT and Wifi share the same chipset? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/linuxquestions

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Recently, I ran into an issue where my bluetooth headphones suddenly got super glitchy when working from my parents house. I found out from the Arch Wiki (see Section 2.4.5) that the reason is that in my laptop the Bluetooth and Wifi are on the same card/chip.

I was able to mitigate by forcing my wifi to 5Ghz. But I am wondering the why behind this. I know BT and older wifi protocols operate in the same 2.4Ghz range. But as the wiki states, this is not a problem on Windows, only Linux. So it must be a driver thing? But for it to be not tied to any specific hardware in the wiki, is it just an architectural thing that can't be fixed in the kernel or something?

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[–] possiblylinux127 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there heavy interference at your parents house? (i.e. appliances)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Nope. Actually now that I think about it, it happened at my fiancés mom's place. She has an old ass router from the phone company. It happened on that. And her connection was slower than tethering off my cell phone. But it happened there too. Then I found the answer in the arch wiki, checked/unchecked the box in Hotspot settings on my phone to force 5g, no problems after that.

[–] slushiedrinker 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't have an answer because your glitch is very specific. It only happened with a combination of circumstances and hardware: in a particular place with a particular router. Even if your laptop is old, however, and its wifi chip is now supported by the kernel, there's a chance that in the past it was not fully supported by the kernel, which means people might have had to manually compile and install a driver for that particular wifi card/chip to improve performance. So, find out what wifi hardware it is do a search. You'll maybe find old posts about drivers to compile and install separately where information will be provided about what made it malfunction in the past. That's one of the best ways to get the answer to your question because kernel devs wouldn't be discussing their use cases with the hardware. People who use the hardware and develop separate drivers to solve problems will have discussed it in the past. Off the top of my head, there was a user / developer that used the handle lwfinger that pushed out a ton of Realtek wifi drivers to solve compatibility issues.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I will have to run lshw to verify the chipset and I'm AFK all weekend. But I believe it's Intel ax20x.

That's fair that it's likely a specific hardware issue. But I find it interesting that the folks that wrote that blurb in the Arch wiki were so general about it. They make it sound like it's a general problem more than a specific hardware combo problem.

Maybe the author of that blurb just made it sound moreover general than it really is.

[–] slushiedrinker 1 points 1 year ago

The people that wrote that are responsible for the kernel. You can't get more general than the kernel. Other people are involved in the specifics.