My computer is an ASUS NUC 14 Pro (NUC14RVHU7) and I recently experienced connection loss with its Intel Ethernet Controller I226-V.
I'm using Debian 12, with the last Linux Libre kernel (6.11.0-gnu) and the controller driver is igc.
Shortly after booting up, once connected to my session, the ethernet connection went dead. The problem occurred after just a few minutes.
Just for the record, as I have a dual boot install with Ubuntu 24.04, I encounter the exact same bug though kernel is not the same (6.8.0-45-generic).
I managed to find a solution and came here to share it.
The problem is related to Active-State Power Management (ASPM) that saves power in the PCI Express subsystem by setting a lower power state for PCIe links when the devices to which they connect are not in use. It seems that ASPM is not well managed by the igc driver.
So a solution is to disable ASPM in UEFI.
You'll need to access the UEFI and then :
- Click on the “Power, Performance and Cooling” tab.
- Click on the “Secondary Power Settings” link.
- Scroll down and uncheck the “PCIe ASPM Support” option.
- Press F10 to save the change and exit.
An other way to achieve this without accessing UEFI would be to pass the "pcie_aspm.policy=performance" kernel option at boot time through GRUB (by editing "/etc/default/grub" and passing this command through the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT parameter).
I found this solution here in a RHEL 7 guide, but it didn't work.
You can also try the "pcie_aspm=off" kernel option, which I didn't try yet, as disabling it through UEFI works as expected.
That's it. Hope it will help someone else.
