Hey folks 👋

Recently, I bought a Xiaomi RedmiBook 16 to get more mobility and separate my work environment. Everything was going great, until I booted into Linux and realized the Wi-Fi wasn’t working at all.

After some digging, I found out the issue was related to the Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter. It turns out that after installing the OS or updating the kernel, the firmware breaks. Don’t ask me why, but several logs showed the adapter crashing on boot.

If you’re facing the same issue, here’s a simple workaround that worked for me on Ubuntu. It should also help on other Debian-based distros like Kali, Mint, Deepin, Xubuntu and etc.

What’s the problem?

When the kernel loads, the adapter crashes due to incompatible or missing firmware. You’ll likely see something like this in dmesg:

ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: failed to fetch board data for bus=pci…
ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: failed to load board file…

To fix this, you need to manually replace the firmware files on your system.

If you try searching online, you’ll find several tutorials recommending replacing the main firmware binary. The problem is, most of them point to the same source, and unfortunately, killernetworking.com has been offline for years.

Luckily, I downloaded that binary back then and saved it to a personal drive, since this issue kept happening. I figured it might disappear one day... and it did. So I created a GitHub repository with a .deb package to make things easier.

Step-by-step fix

1 - Clone this repository with this command:

git clone https://github.com/rafael-hs/qualcomm-atheros-qca6174-firmware-adapter

2 - Enter the directory and install the .deb

sudo apt install ./surface-go-wifi_0.0.5_amd64.deb

3 - Then reboot your system:

sudo reboot

That's it! After these steps, your Wi-Fi should be up and running.

Did it work?

It worked perfectly on my Ubuntu install, and I’ve seen others confirm it on similar distros. If you run into any issues or have another solution, drop a comment. It might help someone else!

Thanks for reading and good luck! 🚀