How can I prevent my wifi driver from going catatonic?

Question

I'm using a Lenovo T430s with an Intel(R) Centrino(R) Ultimate-N 6300 wireless chipset. On certain wireless networks, I experience frequent wifi lockups, which require me to reload the wireless module thusly:

modprobe -r iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi

The main clue, aside from lost connectivity, that I need to do this is that dmesg shows:

[ 9351.591170] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Queue 11 stuck for 2000 ms.
[ 9351.591178] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Current read_ptr 153 write_ptr 161
[ 9351.591182] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: On demand firmware reload
[ 9351.592001] ieee80211 phy0: Hardware restart was requested
[ 9351.592149] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: L1 Enabled; Disabling L0S
[ 9351.599072] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: Radio type=0x0-0x3-0x1

1. What causes this?
2. Is there any way to prevent this?

I'm using Linux kernel 3.2.0-4-amd64 from Debian wheezy.

Solution

I found two possible solutions. I'm not sure which one is "best".

Adding wd_disable=1 to the module commandline seems to work, as does 11n_disable=1, as suggested by @slm's answer linked in comments above.

In short, edit /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf and add either:

options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1

or

optoins iwlwifi wd_disable=1

FWIW, I'm using the former at the moment, as I know I don't want to use Wireless-N, and disabling a queue watchdog doesn't seem like a good idea.

Comments

[LatinSuD]

It looks like a Hardware/Firmware/Driver failure. Hard to fix, even hard to workaround (except a script that looks for errors in logs and reloads the module). Good luck.

[slm]

Take a look at my A to this Q: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/90687/…. This sounds like a duplicate but will wait for you to try and confirm.

[Flimzy]

@slm: I'll try that. I found another "solution" as well (wd_disable=1), although it seems less than ideal to disable the queue watchdog. Maybe the Wireless N disabling will be better. I'll report back soon.

[Volker Siegel]

Please find a more common word to replace "catatonic" in the title - I see what you mean, but not preciese enough to replace it. Not sure how the medical condition applies...