Installing Intel iwlwifi firmware for UNCLAIMED Wireless 8260?

Question

I just installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my newly built PC. My motherboard is a Gigabyte H170N-WIFI and I am currently trying to get the wifi up and running on it.

In terminal, when I run lshw -C network this is my output:

*-network
   description: Ethernet interface
   .............other stuff.......
*-network UNCLAIMED
   description: Network controller
   product: Wireless 8260
   vendor: Intel Corporation
   physical id: 0
   bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0
   version: 3a
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pm msi pciexpress cap_list
   configuration: latency=0
   resources: memory:df000000-df001fff
*-network
   description: Ethernet interface
   .............other stuff.......

As you can see the Wireless 8260 remains unclaimed on fresh install though we can detect it. Not sure what unclaimed is but I am assuming I need firmware to get it truly up and running since no surprise sudo ifconfig wlan0 up doesn't work since wlan0 isn't detected by OS yet.

Through some research I found the iwlwifi firmware download links and downloaded the one (iwlwifi-8000-ucode-25.30.13.0.tgz) for my specific card, I have downloaded it and I believe I am ready to install it however I have a few questions.

The very brief installation guide provided in the README states I need to run the command cp iwlwifi-8000C-13.ucode /lib/firmware/ however before doing this, I decided to see what was already there.

ls /lib/firmware/ | grep -i iwlwifi-8 revealed this:

iwlwifi-8000C-13.ucode

I saw the -13 and decided to run diff on the destination file and the one I downloaded and they are identical. So it appears that the firmware is already installed. I now am at a loss for getting this up and running. I found this post this post with a fix however I am hesitant to implement it as the output of my lsci -nnk | grep 0280 -A2 is different then the user's in the above link.

My output is:

04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless 8260 [8086:24f3] (rev 3a)
    Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260 [8086:0010]

My subsystem [8086:0010] is different than the user's above whose is [8086:1130]

I followed the instructions provided in the accepted answer for the other question with my values plugged in. When I got to drv.c and checked under the 8000 series, I see the first line

{IWL_PCI_DEVICE(0x24F3, 0x0010, iwl8260_2ac_cfg)},

This line indicates to me that my subsystem pci.id should be covered and everything as if the 'fix' is already done. It appears that all the work I would need to do to get this up and running is already done yet the card remains unclaimed.

Any ideas??

Thanks.

Solution

Fixed my own problem

When I saw that the drv.c file was exactly how it should have been, I got frustrated and stopped. Turns out this was a good thing and I needed to keep following instructions. I then finished the fix by running the commands to actually install the backport that I learned about from the above linked post in my question.

cd ~/Desktop/backports-20150923
make clean
make defconfig-iwlwifi
make
sudo make install

This and a reboot was all I needed to get the wireless drivers perfected

Comments

[itnet7]

I had a similar issue on a Dell Precision 5510. Thanks for this post.

[chili555]

Please note from the linked answer: You have compiled the driver for your currently installed kernel version only. When Update Manager installs a later linux-image, after the required reboot, please recompile. Glad it's working!

[Dominic Farolino]

Yes, thank you. For whatever reason, just because the backport drv.c had what I needed, I thought I didn't need to compile and restart it and all. Obviously that was wrong...Thanks for your answer in the linked question as well @chili555