Arch Linux

David López

Member

Registered: 2012-08-26

Posts: 98

[SOLVED] Malfunctioning Marvell 8897 wifi card in the Surface Pro 3

Hi. I've found an issue in the Marvell 8897 wifi card of my MS Surface Pro 3 after upgrading linux-firmware-20160915.c4c07a8-1. The internet connection worked, but the download rate was extremely low (between 10-100KBytes/s in my 30Mbits/s connection) and it was almost impossible to load a webpage with images, to see a video on youtube, etc. I'm using linux-surface3-4.6-1 kernel, but I've checked in the up-to-date (at this moment) linux-4.7.5-1 and the behaviour was the same.

Downgrading to linux-firmware-20160730.6bc2c60-1 solves the problem, but I've found a (IMHO) better solution.

I've downloaded pcie8897_uapsta.bin and sd8897_uapsta.bin, version 15.68.7.p66 from the Mavell git repository:

http://git.marvell.com/?p=mwifiex-firmw … b96b12a73c

and I've used both files to overwrite pcie8897_uapsta.bin and sd8897_uapsta.bin in the folder /usr/lib/firmware/mrvl (I needed to rename both git files). After restarting the SP3, the internet connection worked well.

You can check the version of the files with

dmesg

If you found something like

mwifiex_pcie 0000:01:00.0: info: MWIFIEX VERSION: mwifiex 1.0  (15.68.7.p66) 
mwifiex_pcie 0000:01:00.0: driver_version = mwifiex 1.0 (15.68.7.p66) 

you would have overwritten the right files. The version which has issues in my tablet is 15.68.7.p77. I've marked the thread as solved, and I wish this solution worked for anybody who has the same problem.