Intel Wireless-AC 8260 not exposed as network interface on Debian 8

I have been unable to get Debian 8 (Jessie) to install my Wifi Card (GigaByte GC-WB867D-I REV 4.2) as a network adapter. The card is reported as "Supported" by The latest release of Intel's Linux Driver (iwlwifi)

I installed iwlwifi and updated it via apt-get to the latest version, as well as downloading and copying the supported microcode firmware binaries for the card to \lib\firmware (not in the \intel subfolder).

I have also installed firmware-iwlwifi and reinstalled the iwlwifi kernel module using:

modprobe -r iwlwifi ; mod probe iwlwifi

Several attempts and reboots have resulted in no success. ifconfig wlan0 up reports no device is registered to that interface.

Meanwhile Windows 7 sees the card and installed the drivers for it (but has some technical issues with it working)

Debian is aware of the card, as it is present on PCI:

#lspci -nn | grep "8260"

03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless 8260 [8086:24f3] (rev 3a)`

I have already followed the instructions here for installing wifi cards at the Debian Project Wiki

Wireless Chipset: Intel Wireless-AC 8260

Toshi

Posted 2016-07-05T02:59:54.800

Reputation: 33

Answers

This wireless card is only supported in newer kernels. Debian stable's kernel is too old so that is why no interface shows up.

I have the same card, and my solution was to update to Debian testing (kernel 4.6.0 at this time). Afterwards it showed up for me as wlp1s0. Possibly you could do this with backporting a kernel and firmware (or getting firmware separately). But testing is pretty stable anyway.

Some links that may be useful: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/network-and-i-o/wireless-networking/000005511.html and https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=117391

I have found some stability connections with it though. Occasionally I lose connection and need to restart networking. I'm currently trying to resolve this. I just updated to the -21 firmware and it is still happening, but I'm trying messing with power management settings to see if that has any effect. Other than that I'm going to try a newer module version.

horgh

Posted 2016-07-05T02:59:54.800

Reputation: 21

Did you manage to solve the stability problems? I get them too with kernel 4.10, -21 firmware. – Mr.WorshipMe – 2017-07-13T20:09:25.613

Yeah, it's very stable for me now. I'm using kernel 4.9.0 and firmware 8000C-22, both are stock Debian stretch. – horgh – 2017-07-15T16:12:19.753

Sorry didn't mean to post that without saying more. When I originally debugged this I compiled and installed iwlwifi module from git and used newer firmware (from the pages I linked in my original answer as I recall). However, that didn't solve the problem. What I eventually did was replace my wifi router and that fixed everything, oddly enough. – horgh – 2017-07-15T16:15:03.397

According to Intel-linux-support you need to upgrade the current kernel version from 3.16 to 4.1 to get wifi working

GAD3R

Posted 2016-07-05T02:59:54.800

Reputation: 2 677