iwlwifi missing firware for intel ax201

[donaldinho]

Ubuntu 20.04 does not have the correct firmware for the Intel ax201 wifi 6 wireless card

This affects both the 5.4 and 5.8 kernels shipped with Ubuntu 20.04

currently ubuntu has this version of the firmware
/lib/firmware/iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-48.ucode

Kernel 5.4 is looking for iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-50.ucode

Kernel 5.8 is looking for iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-56.ucode

both kernels load iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-48.ucode as a fall back but having the latest firmware is desirable

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS
Release: 20.04

$ apt-cache policy linux-firmware
linux-firmware:
  Installed: 1.187.3
  Candidate: 1.187.3
  Version table:
 *** 1.187.3 500
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.187 500
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/main i386 Packages

[Kai-Heng Feng (kaihengfeng)]

Is there any issue on 48 ucode?

[donaldinho (don-donaldinho)]

yes. With iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-48.ucode firmware version there were issues with WiFi.

There were errors in dmesg like 'Microcode SW error detected' and the driver would go in a restart loop repeatedly encountering that error meaning that wifi wasn't connected/not working.

I also had issues tethering my laptop to my android phone hotspot

I downloaded iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-50.ucode from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git to see if that would work better with the 5.4 kernel but the issues persisted.

I then upgraded to the 5.8 kernel and these issues persisted with the iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-50.ucode firmware

I went looking for the iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-56.ucode firmware in the linux-firmare git repo but couldn't find it in the downloads so I upgraded my firmware to iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-55.ucode and that seems to be a lot more stable.

So in short there were instabilities and errors in the firmware that seems to be fixed with the newer version

On a more general note should we not be shipping the firmware versions that the kernel is looking for?

[Kai-Heng Feng (kaihengfeng)]

Vicamo, can you please assess on SRU -55.ucode for Focal?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for linux-firmware (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[You-Sheng Yang (vicamo)]

For 5.4 kernel, iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-50.ucode was added for bug 1900883 in version >= 1.187.4.

For 5.8 kernel, iwlwifi-QuZ-a0-hr-b0-55.ucode was added for bug 1907158 in version >= 1.187.7.

Nothing else remains undone, so I'm marking this as duplicate of 1900883.