After upgrading my archlinuxarm based Kodi media center as usual with just running pacman -Syu over ssh I didn't suspect anything. But on the next reboot the system blocked with waiting for wlan0 to get online.

At first I suspected the kernel or linux-firmware upgrade, since a quick search found that this caused trouble in the past: firmware update breaks wifi on Rpi3

Downgrading linux-firmware

Since remote connection was broken I sat with the keyboard in front of the TV screen and tried to downgrade the linux-firmware package from the pkg cache:

sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux-firmware-20240610.9c10a208-1-any.pkg.tar.xz

My hope for this easy fix were crushed, when the network still didn't start correctly after the next reboot. So I started to look into system logs with sudo systemctl status --all and realized that wpa_supplicant@wlan0.service couldn't start.

Investigating Further

Searching again I found https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=298025 from 2024-07-25 indicating that WiFi on Broadcom devices seems broken after the upgrade to wpa_supplicant 2.11.

Looking again in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ I realized that the old wpa_supplicant package was missing. Probably since it 2.10 was the current version when I installed the whole system.

Moving forward I decided to switch to iwd, which seems better maintained and I also use it on my Laptop.

Switching to iwd

So I headed to https://archlinuxarm.org/packages/armv7h/iwd, downloaded the package and its dependency ell manually, copied it together with the WiFi configuration from my laptop from /var/lib/iwd/ to a USB flash drive and installed them:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo pacman -U /mnt/iwd-2.19-1-armv7h.pkg.tar.xz /mnt/ell-0.67-1-armv7h.pkg.tar.xz

Then I replaced wpa_supplicant with iwd

sudo systemctl stop wpa_supplicant@wlan0.service
sudo systemctl disable wpa_supplicant@wlan0.service
sudo pacman -Rs wpa_supplicant
sudo systemctl enable iwd.service
sudo systemctl start iwd.service

And 🎉 working WiFi again on my Kodi system!