[Solved] No Wifi adapter found for QCNFA765 Wireless Network Adapter

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Hi,

I've installed RHEL8 on my laptop with "QCNFA765" Wireless Network Adapter (pci id 17cb:1103). Looking at some forums, I find that ath11k_pci is the required kernel module to make the wifi work.

I installed elrepo kernel-ml.

$ uname -a
Linux mypc 5.17.4-1.el8.elrepo.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Apr 19 12:13:17 EDT 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I see that the kernel module is loaded.

$ lsmod | grep ath
ath11k_pci             32768  0
ath11k                364544  1 ath11k_pci
qmi_helpers            32768  1 ath11k
mac80211             1101824  1 ath11k
cfg80211             1044480  2 ath11k,mac80211
mhi                    90112  1 ath11k_pci

$ lspci -nn | grep -i net
02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 0e)
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Device [17cb:1103] (rev 01)
05:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller [10ec:8168] (rev 15)

I checked that the wifi hardware works in Windows and Ubuntu liveusb. So, the hardware is okay.

Any help in getting the wifi to work in rhel will be appreciated.

Varun

VA
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Responses

VA Newbie 10 points
28 April 2022 3:14 AM

Found the solution.

The output of dmesg had an error when loading the ath11k driver.

$dmesg
mhi mhi0: Direct firmware load for ath11k/WCN6855/hw2.0/amss.bin failed with error -2

The error suggested there is some error with detecting the hardware. Further looking at the /lib/firmware/ath11k directory, I found that sub-directory WCN6855 was missing, which means that the wifi firmware that the driver is looking for is missing.

Copying the firmware from https://github.com/kvalo/ath11k-firmware/tree/master/WCN6855/hw2.0 and https://github.com/kvalo/ath11k-firmware/tree/master/WCN6855/hw2.0/1.1/WLAN.HSP.1.1-02892.1-QCAHSPSWPL_V1_V2_SILICONZ_LITE-1 to /lib/firmware/ath11k/WCN6855/hw2.0 and then rebooting the system fixes the wifi problem. I do need to use the linux kernel 5.17 from ELRepo kernel-ml repository.

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 12807 points
28 April 2022 3:04 PM

Thanks for sharing the solution