Disabling wifi, bluetooth and ipv6

[bedna]

rpi4b8gb device.

I am trying to disable wifi, bluetooth and ipv6 like I do on raspberry pi OS, but it won't play nice with me.

 

Bluetooth & wifi

I read https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Armbian_overlays/ (it says it's WIP so that might be why?) and looked for the dtolverlays I use on rpiOS:

$ ls -1 /boot/dtb/overlays/disable* | cut -d / -f 5
disable-bt.dtbo
disable-bt-pi5.dtbo
disable-emmc2.dtbo
disable-wifi.dtbo
disable-wifi-pi5.dtbo

$ ls -1 /boot/dtb-6.12.31-current-bcm2711/overlays/disable* | cut -d / -f 5
disable-bt.dtbo
disable-bt-pi5.dtbo
disable-emmc2.dtbo
disable-wifi.dtbo
disable-wifi-pi5.dtbo

 

They are there, ie disable-bt and disable-wifi, so I edited /boot/armbianEnv.txt and added:

overlays=disable-bt disable-wifi

 

But after reboot they are still active (see wifi interface below about ipv6):

$ systemctl status bluetooth.service 
● bluetooth.service - Bluetooth service
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Thu 2025-06-05 18:17:32 CEST; 4min 3s ago
       Docs: man:bluetoothd(8)
   Main PID: 610 (bluetoothd)
     Status: "Running"
      Tasks: 1 (limit: 8723)
     Memory: 3.1M
        CPU: 102ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/bluetooth.service
             └─610 /usr/libexec/bluetooth/bluetoothd

 

Yes, I know, I can just disable and mask the service, but this way should work too right?

 

IPV6

And for ipv6 I edited armbianEnv.txt and added:

extraargs=ipv6.disable=1

 

But still available (you can also see wifi not disabled):

$ ls -l /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6
# this should not be available
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun  5 18:19 /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6

$ ip addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host noprefixroute 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: end0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether <redacted> brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.99.60/24 metric 100 brd 192.168.99.255 scope global dynamic end0
       valid_lft 42013sec preferred_lft 42013sec
    inet6 <redacted>/64 scope link 
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/ether <redacted> brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

 

The strange thing is on my OrangePi-PC2 disabling ipv6 this way works...

 

Any advice?

[Werner]

docs don't apply for rpi family since it uses proprietary boot way. Upstream howtos for editing /boot/firmware/config.txt apply.

dtoverlay=disable-bt
dtoverlay=disable-wifi

 

[bedna]

Wow, that was fast!

 

But what about ipv6? It works on the community image for opi-PC2 as I mentioned but not here..

 

Edit.

Nvm, I see there is a cmdline.txt file in there..

Thank you for the fast reply!

Edited yesterday at 05:11 PM by bedna

[Werner]

I don't know if there is an option to disable ipv6 on bootloader level but that's not necessary anyway. You can do that in userspace via sysctl.conf, just use your favorite search engine and you will find how this works.

[bedna]

It works.

 

On armbian:

In /boot/armbianEnv.txt

extraargs=ipv6.disable=1

Worked on my orangePi-PC2 at least.

 

On rpiOS:

In /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt, add ipv6.disable=1 to your console line, for example:

console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=583925ff-02 rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes ipv6.disable=1 rootwait

 

You can check if it works:

$ ls /proc/sys/net/ipv6
ls: cannot access '/proc/sys/net/ipv6': No such file or directory

 

Edited 13 hours ago by bedna