Intel WiFi Driver Effort

[ammulder]

All,

I've started work on a project to port the current-generation Intel WiFi drivers from Linux to OS X. Right now it's very, very early in a process that looks to be a very, very long one. I have a kext that identifies compatible hardware and loads and digests the matching firmware, but it doesn't yet do important things like, say, connect to a network.

Still, it's a start, and if anybody has a recent Intel WiFi card and wants to give it a spin and confirm whether it recognized the card successfully, there's a build with instructions here:

https://github.com/ammulder/AppleIntelWiFiMVM/releases/

The list of compatible hardware is here (it includes the Broadwell and Skylake NUC WiFi cards):

https://github.com/ammulder/AppleIntelWiFiMVM/

 

[zipfly75]

Intel WiFi Driver Effort - Intel® Wireless 7265

I can test it tomorrow on 10.11 with Intel Wireless 7265 and post the result here.
Update: there is no kext file there. I am setting up Xcode to build and create kext file from source.

 

[iw4cdk]

I can test it tomorrow on 10.11 with Intel Wireless 7265 and post the result here.
Update: there is no kext file there. I am setting up Xcode to build and create kext file from source.

Any news, you do it?
It would be great !!!

 

[zipfly75]

Intel WiFi Driver Effort testing on X1 Carbon

Here is the log file. I just selected whatever was having the name of WiFi card.

 

[osx01]

Hi, ammulder.

I have a Intel 8260 wifi and would like to test it for you.

I upload the driver-file. It's recognized correctly. Since I don't know much about the hardware, I log the result from Console.app and hope it's useful for you.

View attachment AppleIntelwifi_from_Console_8260.txt
It's a great job.

 

[ammulder]

zipfly75, I see this:

loading for device Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless AC 7265
LOADED firmware file iwlwifi-7265-16.ucode
Parsed TLV firmware Release: 16.242414.0
​

And osx01:

loading for device Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless AC 8260
LOADED firmware file iwlwifi-8000C-16.ucode
Parsed TLV firmware Release: 16.242414.0
​

That's all the right output in both cases. Glad to see it! And thanks for testing.

However, I don't have much of a status update on a functional driver. Recognizing the hardware and loading the firmware turned out to be the easy part. Now I'm working on the actual wireless functionality, and there's a LOT of code in the Linux driver. I think maybe I underestimated the complexity.

Anyway, I'm working on getting it all running in OS X. I don't really have an ETA. Maybe I'll try to give an update every week? Right now I'm working on eliminating the basic syntax differences and putting together a list of all the functions that the Linux driver calls that don't exist under OS X.

 

[anvil14]

Thanks for taking on this challange, Keep up the great work!

 

[grantfitz]

Where do I put the kext? Thanks!

 

[ammulder]

That's a curious error. The location shouldn't matter when you load it manually like this.

Try setting the permissions first, if you haven't already:

sudo chown -R root:wheel AppleIntelWiFiMVM.kext
sudo kextload AppleIntelWiFiMVM.kext

If that doesn't help, please run Console.app and put "AppleIntelWiFi" in the search box and copy and paste the matching entries into a post here.

 

[grantfitz]

I moved it to another directory and now it loaded fine! But in Console.app, I got this output. It may be because I installed it incorrectly, but here it is.