Intel 7260 firmware causes crashes, needs updating

This wireless card is extremely problematic on any operating system. Users from Windows 7, 8, 8.1, BSD, Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu have all reported the exact same issue. A quick Google search of this card reveals a world of complaints that makes me truly question why companies are *still* shipping it... System76, Dell, Lenovo, WHY ship a problematic card?

I called Intel about my frequent disconnects on my XPS 13 Ubuntu Dev Edition, and Intel confirmed it is a known problem and they are working for a fix. (though they've been working on a fix since this chip came out a year ago with no substantial headway yet, so...). Given the length of time this chip has been out with no actual fix, I'm likely going to be stuck with swapping out my XPS with a non-7260 unit as per Dell, as Dell has no other M.2 form factor wireless cards to swap with, so that's all they could offer.

I have tried Intel's latest firmware at the time of this post and can confirm it yielded no difference in results. I still disconnect at random across the 5 wireless networks I tested with different encryption levels. Sometimes it's once every 3 days (no big deal), other times a dozen times in 20 minutes (major deal breaker). It's wildly sporadic.

There was a lengthy bug report that was just split off to a new report to centralize around these issues. Perhaps you can read it over and see if this applies to you.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1349572

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 04:01:48PM -0000, JaSauders wrote:
> There was a lengthy bug report that was just split off to a new report
> to centralize around these issues. Perhaps you can read it over and see
> if this applies to you.

No!

I've been trying to be clear in my previous responses to your messages,
but let me reiterate: I do _not_ want a centralized bug report. It's
better for users to file an individual bug report so we can capture the
logs and hardware information from that machine, unless they have the
exact same machine and symptoms as the existing bug. We can always dup
bugs later if we find out that they really do represent the same
problem.

In this case the problems are clearly unrelated, since this one is about
a firmware crash and the one you point out has nothing to do with
firmware crashes. When we start piling unrelated problems onto a single
bug report it can quickly become unmanagable. So _please_ do not point
people at a single, "central" bug report for 7260 wireless issues.
Thanks!