Integration Guide¶

Driver and Firmware Overview¶

Intel® Wi-Fi is natively supported in Linux. Intel upstreams the Wi-Fi driver kernel source tree to kernel.org., making it easy for customers to enable Intel® Wi-Fi. Intel also maintains an upstream backport driver to kernel.org. This approach benefits customers who require support for newer driver features on older kernel versions. This section provides guidance on how to integrate the Intel® Wi-Fi backport driver.

Software Stack for the Backport Driver¶

The backport driver can be compatible with multiple kernel versions and tested against recent long-term kernel versions. In the following diagram, it shows the components that can be used in Linux.

Software stack for backport driver

User-Space Tool and Daemon Components¶

These components include the wireless tool (iw tool), client daemon (wpa_supplicant) and AP daemon (hostapd). These components are not maintained by Intel and fully leverage components from the open-source community.

Name	Purpose	Open-Source Community Website
wpa_supplicant	Daemon for controlling Wi-Fi in STA mode	Documentation
hostapd	Daemon for controlling Wi-Fi in soft access point mode	Documentation
iw tool	Tool for query and control Wi-Fi settings	Documentation

Intel Driver Components¶

These components include the Wi-Fi frameworks — mac80211.ko and cfg80211.ko, backport driver abstraction layer — compat.ko, and Intel driver implementation — iwlwifi.ko, iwlmld.ko and iwlmvm.ko.

Intel® Firmware Components¶

These components include the Wi-Fi firmware — *.ucode and regulatory support file *.pnvm.

Intel® Wi-Fi Integration¶

This section describes the recommended workflow for enabling and integrating Intel® Wi-Fi on the target platform. A high-level flow diagram is shown below.

Integration workflow

Hardware Integration Phase¶

In this phase, the firmware of your platform will do the PCIe bus scan. The PCIe root complex (RC) will read both PCIe Vendor ID and PCIe Device ID from the Configuration Space Header and configuration space body. This will allow the PCIe link between the host and the Intel® Wi-Fi endpoint to be configured properly. This phase does not involve the Intel® Wi-Fi firmware or drivers, and is entirely managed by the platform PCIe host controller.

Use the following Linux command to verify that the module is detected and enumerated correctly:

lspci

The following is an example output:

6e:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Device 2725

PCIe detection output

6e:00.0 — This is the BDF (Bus, Device, Function) node of your PCIe bus.
8086 — This is Intel's PCI Vendor ID.
2725 — This is the Device ID of Intel® Wi-Fi that you use. The example 0x2725 is the Device ID of AX210.

Refer to this table for the Intel discrete Wi-Fi Device ID:

Wi-Fi Device	Device ID
AX210	0x2725
BE200	0x272b

Software Integration Phase¶

This phase describes how to integrate Intel® Wi-Fi software components—including Linux kernel drivers and firmware—into a non-x86 platform.

The Intel® Wi-Fi backport driver is a self-contained, out-of-tree kernel module package. It includes its own compatible cfg80211 and mac80211 wireless subsystem layers, allowing it to work independently of the kernel's built-in wireless stack. This makes it suitable for a wide range of kernel versions and vendor-customized kernels. The driver can be built either natively on the target platform or cross-compiled from an x86 host, depending on platform capability and development environment.

Build Methods¶

Choose the build method that best fits your platform:

Method	Best For	Details
Native Build from Source	Vendor-customized kernels	Build directly on the target platform
Cross-Compilation from Source	Embedded/resource-limited targets	Build on x86 host, deploy to target

Installing Prerequisites¶

Building the backport driver requires standard Linux kernel build tools: a C compiler, make, flex, bison, bc, and kernel header/crypto development libraries. Ensure these tools are installed on the build system — either the target platform (for native builds) or the x86 host (for cross-compilation).

For cross-compilation, a toolchain for the target architecture is also required.

Here is an example command to install prerequisites in Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install git build-essential bc flex bison libssl-dev libelf-dev

For other distributions or building environments, install the equivalent packages using your platform's package manager.

Network Connectivity

If apt commands or git clone operations fail with connection errors (e.g., timeouts, "Could not resolve host", or "Failed to connect"), make sure the machine is able to connect to the APT Server. In some network environments the proxy setting may be required. Contact the network administrator regarding proxy setup.

Wi-Fi Daemon and Tool Integration Phase¶

The components used in this phase are not provided or maintained by Intel. Refer to the following open-source community websites for details:

Name	Purpose	Open-Source Community Website
wpa_supplicant	Daemon for controlling Wi-Fi in STA mode	Documentation
hostapd	Daemon for controlling Wi-Fi in soft access point mode	Documentation
iw tool	Tool for query and control Wi-Fi settings	Documentation