Ansible role: QCA6174 firmware installation

An Ansible role for the installation of the working firmware binaries for the Qualcomm QCA6147 wireless card, which ships in a lot of recent laptop models.

Running this role should make the WiFi and Bluetooth to function properly.

To check if your laptop comes with this wireless card, use the lspci utility command:

$ sudo update-pciids
$ lspci | grep QCA6174
02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 32)

This setup was tested in a Dell Inspiron 5557 model (Serie 5000 Special Edition, as sold in the Brazilian market, Dell specifications). As this laptop is a Skylake one (it comes with the 6th generation Intel i7), using a recent Linux kernel is a better choice because of the better support for the architecture (specially the power management).

Installing Debian Stretch (using the netinstall image with non-free firmware) in this laptop made it to work nicely. The battery have decent life, and the sound, the built-in camera, WiFi and Bluetooth works. The only exception is the NVIDIA discrete GPU card (the laptop is Optimus-based, with an integrated Intel graphics card and a NVIDIA GeForce GPU card), so it seems Linus middle finger wasn't enough.

Requirements

• Debian Stretch
• Ansible 2.0

Role Variables

qcaf_debian_repository_mirror: the Debian repository mirror to use. Defaults to http://httpredir.debian.org/debian.

As this role installs non-free packages (namely, firmware-linux, firmware-linux-free, firmware-linux-nonfree and firmware-atheros), the /etc/apt/sources.list file is manipulated (it backups the original file before).

Dependencies

None.

Example Playbook

- hosts: localhost
  roles:
    - eriksencosta.qca6147-firmware

License

Apache License 2.0

Author Information

Eriksen Costa