Friday 29 November 2013

Intel 7260 wireless stops working / is dropping in kernel versions 3.11/3.12


I'd recently been having trouble with the Intel 7260 wireless card in my laptop with these kernels. There were several manifestations of the problem:

  • With powersaving on the card would repeatedly drop and eventually reconnect under kernel 3.12
  • With powersaving off and connected in ac mode the card would frequently (but very quickly) drop authentication, then reauthenticate with the network. This mostly manifested in the form of freezes in audio/video conversations, and was visible in dmesg.
  • With powersaving off and connected in bgn mode the wireless would work pefectly for a certain amount of time, and then stop. Wireless would still show as connected, but there would be no network traffic. Fixing this required turning the network interface off and on again.
There are several bugreports up for this card in Bugzilla at the moment, so I decided to try pulling in some more up-to-date iwlwifi code from the compat-wireless backports repository. A guide on compiling and installing these can be found here or in the answer here.

The long and short of it is, in the dir with the tarball:
tar -xvf backports-*.tar.gz
cd backports*
make defconfig-iwlwifi
make -j2
sudo make install    
After building and installing the compat wireless for kernel 3.12.1, my current running kernel (you can determine yours with uname -a) I've found the experience to be much better so far, no irritating drops to date.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you!

    Your solution is the only one that worked for me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Do you think this will work with 3.13?

    ReplyDelete