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2026 09 14

  2. 2 minutes

First time encountering system breaking down after updating. Maybe it’s a challenge which every daily GNU/Linux user will face.

After a system update, WiFi on my ThinkPad X14 stopped working. I first noticed the WiFi list was empty in dms, then confirmed it with nmcli device wifi list – still nothing.

I vaguely remembered the same thing happening when I set up Fedora Everything 44 on this machine from scratch, back then I suspected a kernel problem and ended up downloading the driver files on another machine and copying them over with a hard drive. That was too much hassle this time, so I tried tethering my iPhone over USB instead – it worked. With network access restored, I fired up opencode to debug it, and here’s what Deepseek V4 Pro diagnosed:

  • nmcli radio reported WIFI-HW: missing, and rfkill had no WiFi device at all, so this was not a NetworkManager problem.
  • journalctl -k revealed the real story: iwlwifi detected the Intel Wi-Fi 7 BE213 card fine, but then “no suitable firmware found”. The updated kernel (7.2.4) requires iwlwifi-sc-a0-wh-b0-c102 through c106, while only c101 was present in /usr/lib/firmware/.
  • Root cause: Fedora shipped a new kernel whose firmware requirements outpace the linux-firmware package.

The first fix attempt was to download the missing .ucode files manually from kernel.org. That failed twice – git.kernel.org is behind an Anubis anti-bot challenge, and the URL returned not found in the browser. Then came the actual insight: on Fedora, iwlwifi firmware does not live in the main linux-firmware package. It is split into subpackages (iwlwifi-mld-firmware and friends), and I had none of them installed. In fact, even the c101 file I already had was “not owned by any package” – probably a leftover from the manual copy last time.

The real fix turned out to be one command:

sudo dnf install iwlwifi-mld-firmware

It ships iwlwifi-sc-a0-wh-b0-c106.ucode.xz, the kernel supports compressed firmware (CONFIG_FW_LOADER_COMPRESS_XZ=y), and after a modprobe -r iwlwifi && modprobe iwlwifi the WiFi list was back.

Nice feeling, solving a problem that once required a hard-drive round trip with a single dnf command.

next: 2026 09 13