how to upgrade firmware intel wifi iwlwifi ? unstable wireless Intel 7260 with lenovo t440p

Question

How to upgrade the firmware intel WiFi from 7260-10 to 7260-12.

on Intel page said: "Installation of the firmware is simply:"

# cp iwlwifi-*.ucode /lib/firmware

So I have

#sudo ls -al /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-*
-rw-r----- 1 root root 672352 Mar 19 14:19 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-10.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 782300 Mar 19 13:35 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-12.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 683236 Nov 24 15:42 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-7.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 679780 Dec  1 15:16 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-8.ucode
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 680508 Dec  1 20:45 /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-9.ucode

But I doesn't load the last version 7260-12, trying to reboot but no luck it stays with 7260-10 .

sudo dmesg | grep iwl
[    4.673076] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: found PCI INT A -> IRQ 10
[    4.673090] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: sharing IRQ 10 with 0000:00:1c.1
[    4.680093] iwlwifi 0000:03:00.0: loaded firmware version 23.15.10.0 op_mode iwlmvm

and

modinfo iwlmvm 
filename:       /lib/modules/3.19.0-6-generic/updates/drivers/net/wireless/iwlwifi/mvm/iwlmvm.ko
version:        backported from Linux (v3.19-rc1-0-g97bf6af) using backports v3.19-rc1-1-0-g74aaf28

I have unstable WiFi connection.

Answer 1

Have you tried

sudo cp /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-10.ucode /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-10.ucode.bak
sudo cp /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-12.ucode /lib/firmware/iwlwifi-7260-10.ucode

Then reboot, renaming the file works sometimes

You could edit the source from the backports by going into the backports directory and into /driver/net/wireless/iwlwifi and edit iwl-7000.c line 72 as it should be

#define IWL7260_UCODE_API_MAX   10

and change it to

#define IWL7260_UCODE_API_MAX   12

Save and exit text editor, then you can

make clean
make defconfig-iwlwifi
make
sudo make install

and see if it will load the 12.ucode without changing file names.