Enable WiFI 6E / 6GHz on Dell XPS 15 9530 / Precision 5570 in Linux

Apr 9th 2026

After switching to Dell Precision 5570 I found something was odd about my WiFi. It uses (soldered in) Intel AX211 WiFi module which is supposed to be AX 6GHz (aka WIFI 6E) compatible, yet laptop was not seeing any 6GHz networks. Some research revealed that in its infinite wisdom, Dell listed this model only as WiFi 6 and silently blocked 6GHz bands in hardware settings.

If you ran Linux in the past it is possible that it was working until it stopped. That's because Intel enforced this setting in one of kernel updates. But it is possible to bypass it (on Linux), it is pretty easy and it doesn't require any kernel compilation/modifications :)

Backstory

If you are not interested in details, you can scroll to The fix section.

While this article is specifically for Dell XPS 9530 / Precision 5570 (they are siblings that share the same mainboard and BIOS, just differ in specific components availability and target markets), this probably applies to any other notebook that has Intel WiFi capable of 6Ghz but can't see any networks.

In this case running iw list command will return "disabled" next to the all 6Ghz frequencies on the WiFi adapter.

Due to different WiFi frequencies / channels being available in different countries (and regulatory requirements to sell the device in given country) Intel gave vendors a way to configure available bands in UEFI (explicitly: via ACPI tables). This allows manufacturer to eg. enable only those brands that are available in the country device was sold. Or disable them completely for whatever reason.

The first argument fails quickly with one question - what if device sold in one country was moved to another? Without user being able to configure the region this quickly becomes a problem.

From multiple unofficial sources it seems Dell disabled 6ghz support at all in this model.

Intel linux driver

In a very unpopular move, Intel enabled support for those flags in the Linux kernel iwlwifi driver. This enforces settings on hardware/firmware level and thus makes it immune to setting regulatory domain in software via iw reg set command, as iw reg get will tell describe card asphy#0 (self-managed).

Of course it is possible to downgrade the kernel to one from before 2021... but that's not the solution. You can also try to rebuild kernel, modifying source code to remove the extra parts that forward ACPI settings to the hardware. The actual change is pretty minor and described in this ndoo.sg post.  

The problem is - this requires user to patch and build kernel after every kernel update which is... not great. I was looking for if someone maybe made a dmks module out of the iwlwifi driver but wasn't able to find any sources for that.

ACPI tables

To not go into the details, ACPI tables describe a lot about the hardware details and configuration to the operating system. Important for us is that available brands configuration is indeed part of the ACPI tables. 

Those are normally embedded in UEFI and user can't modify them. I found a Reddit post about a different laptop with the same problem, with a good description of the configuration issue there. After reading through it (and confirming with driver source code) it looked like all that is needed is to patch one function so it returns a proper value for DSM_FUNC_ENABLE_6E flag. 

Turns out that while this seems complicated, it is actually easy to do. All I needed I found in Ayan Nath post about patching the tables and then Arch wiki made it even easier.

The fix

I found this pretty Gist, that, while broken, provided a good base for the fix. This description applies to probably any Linux distribution that uses Grub 2 bootloader and no secure boot enabled.

First, we need to prepare a text file with ACPI patch. Save this as e.g. wifi6e.dsl 

DefinitionBlock ("", "SSDT", 2, "Nana", "Daiba", 0x99)
{
    External (UHBS, IntObj)
    External (_SB.PC00.CNVW, DeviceObj)

    Method (_SB.PC00.CNVW._INI)
    {
        // 0x0 will "not disable anything"
        // This is what the source patch got wrong by setting 0xFFFFFFFF here.
        UHBS = 0x0
    } 
}

Then, we need to make a binary file out of it. For that we need iasl tool, which on Debian is part of acpica-tools package.

root@kitor-7390:acpi$ iasl -tc wifi6e.dsl

Intel ACPI Component Architecture
ASL+ Optimizing Compiler/Disassembler version 20251212
Copyright (c) 2000 - 2025 Intel Corporation

ASL Input:     wifi6e.dsl -     192 bytes      2 keywords      0 source lines
AML Output:    wifi6e.aml -      92 bytes      1 opcodes       1 named objects
Hex Dump:      wifi6e.hex -    1264 bytes

Compilation successful. 0 Errors, 0 Warnings, 0 Remarks, 1 Optimizations

This created wifi6e.aml file, which then needs to be copied to /boot directory.

Now all we need is to add a config line to Grub that will load this entry:

acpi /boot/wifi6e.aml

You can put this e.g. in the end of  /etc/grub.d/40_custom. Then run update-grub, reboot and... that's it!

Summary

At some point I saw a claim that antenna array in Precision 5570 is not capable of running at 6GHz. I can't tell if that's true or false but my laptop has a comparable 6GHz reception to Samsung Fold 7. 

Sadly this won't help Windows users. I'm not aware of any simple method to load patched tables there.