WiFi Intel AX210NGW is not recognized

Question

I have installed a new wifi adapter (Intel AX210NGW) on my Acer Aspire 5 (515-54G-53GP), running Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS, kernel 5.4.0-58-generic but, the system does not recognize it ("WiFi adapter not found"). The Intel website give info about the prior models only (AX200 and AX201) and do not give any info about the AX210 support on the Linux kernel. Does anybody have info (or prediction) about when we will have the Linux kernel (and Ubuntu himself) supporting this newer Wifi from Intel ?

Here is the results of lspci with:

The original wifi adapter (ac 1x1 standard):

sillas@lorena-acer:~$ lspci -nnk | grep 0280 -A3
04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0042] (rev 31)
    Subsystem: Lite-On Communications Inc QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter [11ad:08a6]
    Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci
    Kernel modules: ath10k_pci
sillas@lorena-acer:~$

The new adapter (ax 2x2 standard):

sillas@lorena-acer:~$ lspci -nnk | grep 0280 -A3
04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:2725] (rev 1a)
    Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:0024]
05:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller [0108]: Sandisk Corp Device [15b7:5003] (rev 01)
    Subsystem: Sandisk Corp Device [15b7:5003]
sillas@lorena-acer:~$

Solution 1

According to the Wireless Drivers list for iwlwifi on wireless.wifi.kernel.org, Wifi 6E support which is what the AX210NGW card has is only supported by Linux kernel versions 5.10 and up. This means that you need a version of Ubuntu using Linux kernel 5.10.

Short of running a mainline kernel (which is not officially supported on Ubuntu), the only version of Ubuntu with a version of the Linux kernel that works with the AX210 card from Intel is Ubuntu Hirsute Hippo 21.04 which was released last week.

You will need to either use a newer kernel or upgrade to Ubuntu Hirsute Hippo 21.04.

Solution 2

The AX210NGW requires at least Kernel version 5.10, which was only very recently released. I currently do not know, when Ubuntu will include that, maybe others do.

Comments

[Sillas Oliveira]

Could you please tell me where did you found this info about the AX210 requires kernel 5.10 ?

[Thomas Ward]

@SillasOliveira Link to the information is provided in my answer - pulled from the wireless drivers list from wireless.wifi.kernel.org.