[clue] Wireless card not working

foo7775 at comcast.net foo7775 at comcast.net
Thu Feb 25 16:40:56 MST 2016


Hi Levi, welcome to the CLUE list!! 

First off, I've got to give you credit for 1) making a real, honest effort to resolve this yourself, and 2) providing a lot of good data for us to "chew on". With that said... 

If I'm interpreting the output correctly, it appears that the 'iwlwifi' module is loading correctly, & the hardware is being detected/recognized. This isn't intended to be condescending at all, but does the device appear in the output of 'ifconfig -a'?? I'm wondering if perhaps the interface is there, but simply needs to be enabled using "ifconfig wlan0 UP" (or similar). Speaking from my own experience, it's pretty easy sometimes to overlook the "simple stuff" & dive right into the deeper waters, so to speak. 

Two other thoughts - are there any relevant entries in the system log (/var/log/messages on the RHEL variants that I'm familiar with, not 100% sure if it's the same on the Debian side of the fence) . Finally, it occurs to me that it *might* be worthwhile to download & fire up a LiveCD (or LiveUSB) version of a Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS distro, temporarily boot to that, & see if the wireless interface is recognized/activated, or if you can get some other data on it that way. Sometimes it's helpful to be able to look at the problem from a slightly different angle... 

Finally, did the wireless interface work under WinDoze?? If so, that would likely rule out faulty hardware. 

Again, welcome to the list! 

T. 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Levi S. Darrell" <levidarrell at gmail.com> 
To: clue at cluedenver.org 
Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2016 3:48:13 PM 
Subject: [clue] Wireless card not working 

Dear all at CLUE, 

Thanks for your attention to my email. I have tried posting my problem on the debian mailing lists, as well as on the mailing list at linuxfromscratch.org, but have had no responses. I am hoping someone at CLUE can help me 
with my problem. I live in Eastern Colorado and I have been using linux on my computers for a couple years now. 

In January of 2016, I purchased a Lenovo IdeaPad Y700 laptop, which had Windows 10 pre-installed on it. Since that time I have been unable to get my Intel Wireless 8260 Wireless card to work, either with my Debian Jessie 
stable distro, or with an LFS system that I tried to build from scratch on another disk partition. After several hours searching the internet for solutions, I have seen that this is a common problem with Lenovo computers. Here 
are the solutions that I have tried: 

1. I recompiled the kernel, using the stable 4.4.1 version that I obtained from www.kernel.org via wget. Using apt, I downloaded the package kernel-package. Using menuconfig, I selected the iwlwifi drivers in the wireless 
options. I made the image using the make-kpkg command, and compiled it using the fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --revision=1.0.custom kernel_image command. I rebooted, but the drivers seemed not to have been correct, and the wifi card 
continued not to work. 

2. I then downloaded the most recent backports package using wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/backports/2016/01/22/backports-20160122.tar.gz. I untarred the package, issued the commands make 
defconfig-wifi && make && make install. The program seemed to compile without any errors. I then searched in the /lib/modules/4.4.1/build/drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/pcie/drv.c file, where on line 425 I read: 

{IWL_PCI_DEVICE(0x24F3, 0x1010, iwl8260_2ac_cfg)}, 

This seemed to indicate to me that my device should be supported, based on the lspci -nnk | grep 0280 -A2 command, which gives the following output: 

08:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless 8260 [8086:24f3] (rev 3a) 
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:1010] 
Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi 

However, upon rebooting my machine, my wifi card still did not work. 

3. I then attempted to manage a problem with rfkill by searching in the file /lib/modules/4.4.1/build/drivers/platform/x86/ideapad-laptop.c, which states: 

/* 
* Some ideapads don't have a hardware rfkill switch, reading VPCCMD_R_RF 
* always results in 0 on these models, causing ideapad_laptop to wrongly 
* report all radios as hardware-blocked. 
*/ 

At line 902, I added the following: 

{ 
.ident = "Lenovo Yoga 700", 
.matches = { 
DMI_MATCH(DMI_SYS_VENDOR, "LENOVO"), 
DMI_MATCH(DMI_PRODUCT_VERSION, "Lenovo ideapad Y700 Touch-15ISK"), 
}, 
}, 

This was because the output of the command dmidecode | grep -A3 '^System Information' was: 

System Information 
Manufacturer: LENOVO 
Product Name: 80NW 
Version: Lenovo ideapad Y700 Touch-15ISK 

I guessed based on this that DMI_PRODUCT_VERSION should therefore be set to "Lenovo ideapad Y700 Touch-15ISK". However, upon reboot, rfkill list still showed the following: 

0: hci0: Bluetooth 
Soft blocked: yes 
Hard blocked: no 
1: ideapad_wlan: Wireless LAN 
Soft blocked: no 
Hard blocked: yes 
2: ideapad_bluetooth: Bluetooth 
Soft blocked: no 
Hard blocked: yes 
3: phy0: Wireless LAN 
Soft blocked: no 
Hard blocked: no 

I don't know why phy0 is showing up as a logical device, because that had not been showing up prior to my updating the kernel to 4.4.1. However, I don't think this is part of the problem. Since I am not a developer and I am not really versed in C or any other language, I have no idea if I made some kind of a mistake in some of the fixes that I tried to apply. I believe I have exhausted my capacity to troubleshoot the problem using web searches, and I 
therefore am seeking some help here. The outputs of some other commands appear below for further information: 

dmesg | grep -i iwl 

[ 2.477758] iwlwifi 0000:08:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-8000C-20.ucode failed with error -2 
[ 2.484820] iwlwifi 0000:08:00.0: loaded firmware version 16.242414.0 op_mode iwlmvm 
[ 2.520860] iwlwifi 0000:08:00.0: Unsupported splx structure 
[ 2.557772] iwlwifi 0000:08:00.0: Detected Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless AC 8260, REV=0x208 
[ 2.558389] iwlwifi 0000:08:00.0: L1 Enabled - LTR Enabled 
[ 2.559215] iwlwifi 0000:08:00.0: L1 Enabled - LTR Enabled 
[ 2.567127] iwlwifi 0000:08:00.0: can't access the RSA semaphore it is write protected 
[ 2.718970] ieee80211 phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'iwl-mvm-rs' 

lspci: 

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 1910 (rev 07) 
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 1901 (rev 07) 
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 191b (rev 06) 
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Device a12f (rev 31) 
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Device a13a (rev 31) 
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Device a103 (rev 31) 
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device a111 (rev f1) 
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device a112 (rev f1) 
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device a113 (rev f1) 
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device a14e (rev 31) 
00:1f.2 Memory controller: Intel Corporation Device a121 (rev 31) 
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device a170 (rev 31) 
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Device a123 (rev 31) 
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 139b (rev a2) 
07:00.0 SD Host controller: O2 Micro, Inc. SD/MMC Card Reader Controller (rev 01) 
08:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 8260 (rev 3a) 
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15) 

part of lshw output: 

*-pci:2 
description: PCI bridge 
product: Intel Corporation 
vendor: Intel Corporation 
physical id: 1c.2 
bus info: pci at 0000:00:1c.2 
version: f1 
width: 32 bits 
clock: 33MHz 
capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list 
configuration: driver=pcieport 
resources: irq:124 memory:94100000-941fffff 
*-network DISABLED 
description: Wireless interface 
product: Wireless 8260 
vendor: Intel Corporation 
physical id: 0 
bus info: pci at 0000:08:00.0 
logical name: wlan0 
version: 3a 
serial: a4:34:d9:2f:eb:21 
width: 64 bits 
clock: 33MHz 
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical wireless 
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=4.4.1 firmware=16.242414.0 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11abgn 
resources: irq:130 memory:94100000-94101fff 
*-pci:3 
description: PCI bridge 
product: Intel Corporation 
vendor: Intel Corporation 
physical id: 1c.3 
bus info: pci at 0000:00:1c.3 
version: f1 
width: 32 bits 
clock: 33MHz 
capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list 
configuration: driver=pcieport 
resources: irq:125 ioport:3000(size=4096) memory:94000000-940fffff 
*-network 
description: Ethernet interface 
product: RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller 
vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. 
physical id: 0 
bus info: pci at 0000:09:00.0 
logical name: eth0 
version: 15 
serial: 50:7b:9d:5c:a7:1f 
size: 100Mbit/s 
capacity: 1Gbit/s 
width: 64 bits 
clock: 33MHz 
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation 
configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=full ip=192.168.1.100 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=100Mbit/s 
resources: irq:126 ioport:3000(size=256) memory:94004000-94004fff memory:94000000-94003fff 

lsmod | grep -i iwl: 

iwlmvm 303104 0 
mac80211 552960 1 iwlmvm 
iwlwifi 176128 1 iwlmvm 
cfg80211 466944 3 iwlwifi,mac80211,iwlmvm 
compat 16384 4 cfg80211,iwlwifi,mac80211,iwlmvm 

head -n7 /proc/cpuinfo: 

processor : 0 
vendor_id : GenuineIntel 
cpu family : 6 
model : 94 
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz 
stepping : 3 
microcode : 0x39 

Note that the ethernet card is working properly. 

Thank you for your attention to my email. 

Sincerely, 

Levi S. Darrell 
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