Loading wifi firmware during boot with custom kernel date: 2015-05-14 02:39:43+00:00 categories: - Linux tags: - troubleshooting
Note to self: if your system doesn't connect to the wifi card, check dmesg for something like:
iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: Direct firmware load failed with error -2
This can apparently happen when one builds iwlwifi into the kernel (not a module) because the kernel is happy to try and load firmware before mounting the root filesystem where the firmware lives. This could probably be fixed by having an initial ramdisk with the firmware, but I'm not fond of initrds, so I just moved iwlwifi to a module.
Credit: this solution is from this blog post