Iwlwifi

iwlwifi is [[Article description::the wireless driver for Intel's current wireless chips.]]

Kernel
To make it work some kernel configuration is needed. The driver supports 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (depending on the device), so IEEE 802.11 should be enabled.

IEEE 802.11
iwlwifi however brings its own rate control algorithm iwl-agn-rs, see.

Device driver iwlwifi
Use this driver for Intel's current wireless chips. Set it as a module  as shown here. Also the correct DVM or MVM option according to the Module column of the firmware table is needed.

After rebuilding the kernel and rebooting with this kernel, the selected options can be verified as follows:

Firmware
Additional firmware for the individual device is needed as listed in this table. It is available in and in device-specific sys-firmware/iwlxxxx-*ucode packages.

When using built-in configuration
In case the driver is built into the kernel instead as a module, also the firmware needs to be built into the kernel.

In this case replace  with the exact firmware name. Some attention seems to be needed for FW_LOADER_USER_HELPER_FALLBACK.

modprobe and modinfo
should return nothing:

Most information about the driver module can be obtained by :

lspci
should display  for both   and.

The  identifier will be useful for grepping specific information from dmesg.

dmesg
Check the output of dmesg. Replace  with the identifier from lspci and   with the network interface name.

Kernel not loaded
Check if the correct kernel is loaded. This can be accomplished as follows (depends on the IKCONFIG feature):

Firmware issues

 * For systems using udev or systemd, it is imperative to configure the kernel to load binary blobs. In this case the wireless card's firmware is the firmware that needs loaded. More information on configuring the kernel in this manner can be found in the following thread on the Gentoo forums: FW_LOADER_USER_HELPER_FALLBACK.


 * Linux firmware for iwlwifi ucode failed with error -2 from https://z-issue.com/wp/

Wireless not working

 * Intel Corporation Wireless 8260 (rev 3a) can't access the RSA semaphore it is write protected

No internet connection
If you can connect to an access point, but still can't connect to any server or get any connection to the internet it might be worth a try to disable 802.11n and/or enable software encryption. You can pass the  or   and/or   option to the   module. In order to pass the option automatically on module load create the file as follows:

Note that in newer kernels (inspected as of 5.3.7) setting 11n_disable=1 (or masked with 0x01) will result in 802.11ac being disabled. This will limit the device to only 54Mbit throughput.

External resources

 * https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/iwlwifi
 * https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git
 * https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/IWLWIFI.html
 * https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wireless_network_configuration#iwlwifi