QCA9377 Issues on Linux

This post was originally on my GitHub Pages blog, and was written on January 6, 2016.

—

I recently moved to an Acer Aspire E5–473–30N5, which came with the QCA9377 network card. I booted into an Ubuntu Live CD environment, and to my surprise, Wi-Fi seemed to be unavailable.

At the time of writing, the adapter installed in this laptop has not been supported yet. Not even Ubuntu Wily was able to use the adapter out of the box.

So, thanks to this forum thread, I was able to get it up and running. The instructions listed in the forum thread do not work anymore for two reasons:

The link to a package uploaded to filebin leads to a 404, and
Changes have since been made to the kvalo/ath10k-firmware repository, and do not apply anymore.

So, here are the revised instructions to get the adapter working.

First, download the necessary files.

backports-20151120
Commit 7d14e337ad25c0ef3e78fc47eac336697ca612e8 of kvalo/ath10k-firmware. Download ZIP

Also, make sure you have the dependencies installed.

# pacman -S base-devel linux-headers git

# apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) git

or your distro’s equivalent.

Next, extract backports, and run the following inside the resulting directory.

$ make defconfig-ath10k
$ make
# make install

Finally, inside the ath10k-firmware repository, run the following as root.

# cp -r ath10k/ /lib/firmware/
# cp -r QCA9377 /lib/firmware/ath10k/
# mv /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/firmware-5.bin_WLAN.TF.1.0-00267-1 /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/firmware-5.bin

After rebooting, you should be able to detect and connect to wireless networks.