AWDL causing ping spikes - Patch planned? Can AWDL be permanently disabled?

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Level 1

6 points

AWDL causing ping spikes - Patch planned? Can AWDL be permanently disabled?

Good morning from the UK,

I have had a rather annoying problem with ping spikes for a couple of weeks now, coming out of nowhere. My MBP 16" M1 Pro is the only device on the network exhibiting the problem; a Mac mini M1, MacBook Air M1, iPhone and a number of other devices don't show the same behaviour.

This made video conferencing nigh on impossible with ping spikes regularly exceeding 600-1000ms every 5-10 seconds. After a night of googling and diagnosing the wifi.log it turned out that every few seconds, there would be wifi network discovery on awdl0, preceded by

Mon Jun 27 21:11:45.999 Driver Event: <airport[1456]> _bsd_80211_event_callback: AWDL_PEER_PRESENCE (awdl0)

which skyrocketed the ping every time. This seems to be a common beacon function when other AWDL devices are found in the vicinity - importantly though, none of the other devices show the same behaviour.

I shut down every other program and ran a virus scan to make sure I hadn't caught any nasties somehow, with no signs thereof.

I then simply shut down awdl0 via ifconfig and voila, the ping spikes completely vanished. Unfortunately, after every sleep cycle it restarts, and every time something (legitimately) triggers a wifi network search it restarts again.

This appears to be a known, if uncommon, problem.

Are there any patches planned for this? Is there a way to permanently disable AWDL?

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.4

Posted on Jun 28, 2022 1:21 AM

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Answer 1

PRP_53

Level 10

85,807 points

Jun 28, 2022 4:14 AM in response to Mendorian

Pardon for jumping in there but something of concern pop up.

Q - " I shut down every other program and ran a virus scan to make sure I hadn't caught any nasties somehow, with no signs thereof.

A - There are no known Windows-like Viruses in the wild that self replicate and affect macOS, because of the underling UNIX Foundation and Permission Limitation.

The Only thing this Antivirus software is protecting is the Bank Account of the Developers and for zero return to the User aside from the problems this software creates.

The The Built in Security is all that is required to protect the computer.

A - Any of the below should be removed as per Developers Instructions

This will include CleanMyMac , This will include BitDefender ,

This will included Norton Antivirus , Sophos Av Software

Intego AntiVirus, McAfee, MacKeeper, Avast AntiVirus

Ad Guard, Webroot , ESET

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Answer 2

Mendorian Author

Level 1

6 points

Jun 28, 2022 6:13 AM in response to -Bubba-

I did try, yes. Unfortunately that didn't change anything.

What is a bit odd is how periodical it is. The spike happens almost on the spot every 13 seconds. 10 seconds of no interference, then 3 seconds of a ping spike building, then it immediately drops back to normal.

I also suspected that signal strength might have something to do with it, but signal strength is okay given that I'm a floor up from the AP:

I'd be worried if the RSSI would be below -50dBm. Plus, I can't see how that would trigger AWDL network scans.

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Answer 3

-Bubba-

Level 6

10,150 points

Jun 28, 2022 1:47 AM in response to Mendorian

Unfortunately, there's no way to permanently disable AWDL. You can only do it temporarily through this command, as you found-

sudo ifconfig awdl0 down

You may be able to use a daemon to run it on startup, but I'm afraid I don't know if it can be done in this case, as the command requires root user permission (sudo).

Have you tried disabling AirDrop to see if that helps?

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Answer 4

Mendorian Author

Level 1

6 points

Jun 28, 2022 6:16 AM in response to PRP_53

Pardon, I should've been more careful with my wording.

I installed Malwarebytes to check specifically if I had any browser extensions or similar installed that could be bad actors and potentially trigger location requests without my knowledge, which in turn could trigger AWDL scanning of wireless networks for aGPS coordinates.

However, nothing popped up and even with browsers closed the issue persisted. Malwarebytes has been uninstalled since.

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Answer 5

Mendorian Author

Level 1

6 points

Jun 28, 2022 8:51 AM in response to Keith Barkley

It has been submitted :) I was hoping someone might've figured out a permanent fix on their own, I didn't expect an Apple rep to jump in on this. I had limited success with finding information on Reddit and through Google, just a lot of old information on location services causing similar problems (which I had disabled to check, but that didn't influence the results)

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