Lost sound and network connection - possibly due to update.

[rcdawson]

I was running 20.04 quite happily for many months when I discovered that I no longer had sound or a network connection. The icons for sound and network located in the system tray were both red. Both sound and network had been working without incident up until this point. I don't know for sure, but it seems likely it happened after an update.

I downloaded 20.04.1 and attempted to reinstall, but that installer crashed, so I installed 20.04 with the same media that I had used when I originally installed 20.04. It booted from the media, and I verified that it had sound and network. I proceeded to install, letting the installer download updates during the installation. After rebooting with the new installation I had no sound or network.

Finally, I installed without downloading updates during the installation. After installation I looked through the available updates, and found that there was one with a name something like ubuntu-drivers. I deselected that update, and installed the rest of the updates. I rebooted, and I still had sound and network.

Finally, to conclusively demonstrate that the ubuntu-drivers package was the problem, I installed it and rebooted. To my surprise, I still have sound and network.

Anyone else experience anything like this? Any idea on how to prevent the problem from recurring? Finally, where and how should I report this?

[claydoh]

Looking at many recent posts here in the forum (and elsewhere), ubuntu seems to have pushed out a new kernel (5.8) that is breaking many 20.04 systems like this.
Boot to your last kernel (5.4) via the grub menu for the time being.

[rcdawson]

Thank you for the information. I believe you are correct, because when I checked to see what upgrades had been processed I saw several relating to kernel 5.8, but it something made me think that some pieces of the upgrade were missing. (I'm certainly no expert, and I don't remember what made me think something was missing, but I concluded that perhaps the update had been interrupted by a power glitch or such.)

Now I see the system wants to push out an update to 5.4.0-62. I'm a little nervous about doing so! I think that I will wait a day or so to see if the update gets pulled.

[claydoh]

The 5.4.0 kernel is fine, that is a security update, and not a whole new kernel version.
it is the (possibly accidental?) inclusion of the newer 5.8 that is breaking things.

[oldgeek]

I have been using 20.10 and the 5.8 kernel since it came out and in recent kernel updates have had the loss of network and audio. The cause seems to be that the update packages are incomplete, missing especially the 'modules-extra' part, which comes a day later or so. I recently had an update from 5.8.0-38 to 5.8.0-39, and it was missing that module. Sure enough, the audio and internet failed to work. The missing module came in today, and now it works fine. I don't know why the update packages are sent in an incomplete form, but that seems to be the reason for the lack of audio and network when 5.8 is updated.