[GUIDE] Successful Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) on Framework 13 AMD with Qualcomm QCNCM865 and Arch Linux

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
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I’ve been keeping up with patches that show up on patchwork.kernel.org, however as of yesterday it’s still crashing on upload. I’m applying those patches on top of kvalo’s master branch which I’ve merged on top of Linus Torvalds’ master branch to get the latest changes from everywhere.

I should probably submit a bug report but I’m tired of swapping stuff for now so I likely won’t be submitting one for a while.

One note is that, for an Intel framework motherboard, the QCNCM865 functions just fine (for wifi, anyway) and does not crash, so it’s possible it’s something AMD-specific that’s causing it.

I have some BE202 and MT7925 cards on order and will try those when I get them sometime over the next couple weeks. The BE202 will likely have the same problem as the BE200; I’m hoping that the MT7925 cards will work however given the problems people have with the 6E versions I’m not going to hold my breath for a bug-free experience.

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I still have two issue under 6.10.0-rc1-1-mainline.

  • I cannot connect to any Audio Bluetooth devices (but other bt, like mouse is working good)
  • Something(driver?) crashing when I upload too fast(or too much?)

apart from these two problems, it works very well, with excellent speeds and latencies.

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I think it’s too much uploading. If I use LibreSpeed on my own network, it crashes nearly instantly when the upload test starts, whereas if I go and use Speedtest.net, which is going to get much slower upload speeds, I can make it through probably one test before it crashes midway through the second one.

I’ve tried enabling debugging by setting ath12k.debug_mask=0xffffffff and looking at the output, but as I mentioned and as you’ve noticed, the output from the ath12k just stops completely. Then maybe 10-30 seconds or later I start getting wmi and other timeouts from ath12k.

I thought maybe it had something to do with power management differences between Intel and AMD (since it seems to not crash on Intel machines), but turning power saving off via iw, disabling aspm, and changing the device’s power PCIe power setting to “on” instead of “auto” does not help.

My guess now is that there’s a spinlock or something in the kernel that’s ending up in a deadlock, or that the firmware in the card is just crashing and then stops responding. I’m leaning toward the crashing part since, if I had reset the machine, the card generally won’t come back up on the first reboot. I have to reboot for a second time to get the card to start responding again.

P.S. I should also mention that I’m doing most of my testing on a BeeLink GTR7 Pro, as it exhibits the same behavior as my Framework’s and I don’t want to be tearing those open all the time for testing. Once I find something that is working on the BeeLink I’ll confirm that on one of my Framework’s before I got putting them in everything.

P.P.S. I haven’t really tested bluetooth at all; I think I at one point connected a mouse which may have worked, however I can’t recall if it was this card or another. I don’t use bluetooth audio streaming either so I wouldn’t be able to confirm that. Bluetooth for me is a secondary concern as I really don’t use it at all and is completely turned off most of the time.

Edit: Actually now that I think about it, this is the same behavior I initially had with an XPS 13 9310 several years ago that came with a Qualcomm card and used the new-at-the-time ath10k driver. I can’t recall if I just dealt with it or if it got fixed at some point as I’m usually connected to ethernet anyway. I no longer have the machine though so I can’t check it to see if it still has the same behavior or not.

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I got some BE202’s today, all E-key only, and they cause a boot loop just like the BE200’s. Externally they appear to be identical other than the model number, and in fact use the same FCC ID as the BE200.

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What about the NCM865’s predecessor, NFA765, a.k.a FastConnect 6900? A WiFi 6E card that is rumored to do 2882Mbps on 5GHz

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Was hoping for WIFI 7.

Thanks for testing and reporting back. So it looks like the BE202 and MT7925 are 160 MHz whereas the BE200 and the QCNCM865 are 320 MHz. Hoping for a 320 Mhz WIFI 7 card that works out of the box with AMD and Fedora. I guess I’ll continue to wait. The Intel AX200 is serviceable for now. It’s not killing my 5 GHz radio like the RZ616 at least.

I’m not looking for a 6E card. I already have a AX200 (6E) to keep myself afloat. I’m just hoping to get a WIFI 7 320 MHz card as the next upgrade. I just got the AX200 to keep from killing my 5GHz AP radio. For some reason, the RZ616 (6E) keeps knocking the AP radio offline which causes other endpoints to lose connection until I reboot the AP. It only happens when there’s sustained heavy traffic with the RZ616 (speedtest.net, file transfers to my NAS, etc), etc.

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I got a handful of MT7925 (aka RZ717) cards today; On Linux, they only get ~200Mbit up/down connecting to the same network I can get 600-900Mbit from the AX210 cards. So, even though they’re technically better and Wi-Fi 7, I’ll stick to the AX210 cards for now.

Didn’t test Bluetooth…

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@GreyXor Are you still having the crashing when uploading issue? I haven’t tried this in a couple weeks.

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Yes, in 6.10.0-rc3. But I should test ath12k master from git

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I finally replaced my AP. Just to recap since I’m sure people don’t follow me and my issues - the old one was an Asus RT-AC3200 and the RZ616 kept killing my AP’s 5 GHz radio which knocks out all connectivity for all of my clients on the same band when the RZ616 is doing heavy transfers. I replaced the RZ616 with the AX210, and speeds was more or less the same, but more importantly, it was not killing my AP.

I now saved enough to get a TPLINK EAP773 AP (WIFI7), and the AX210 is performing very well. I was pretty impressed. however, I wanted to see how the RZ616 behaves and performs. Well, no knocking out my AP - good. BUT… in Fedora, I had a hard time connecting and STAY connected (once it does connect). When it DID finally stay connected (after multiple tries), I was only getting 200 Mbps down and 100 Mps up. In Windows 11, it connected quickly, BUT speeds were slower than the AX210. I was getting 800 down 700 up. With the RZ616, I get 690 down and 330 up.

I’m going back to the AX210. And based on my experience with mediatek, I will NOT be getting a WIFI7 card from them. So I’m kinda stuck if I want a WIFI7 card. I can only hope that either the BE200 or the Qualcomm card gets better support on both Linux and Windows with the AMD platform.

Color me disillusioned regarding this WIFI7/AMD situation.

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The uploading bug will be fixed in linux 6.11
https://lore.kernel.org/ath12k/20240715023814.20242-1-quic_bqiang@quicinc.com/T/#u
@ryanpetris

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Happened upon this, I’d like to see about grabbing one of these for some unofficial internal testing. Where might one get one of these?

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I don’t think you can (easily) get them as loose cards, but the easiest way is to buy an

MSI HERALD-BE NCM865 or Gigabyte AORUS GC-WIFI7 version 1.0 ONLY

and remove the WiFi card from that. (Note: The Gigabyte card only has the Qualcomm WiFi chip in version 1, so be careful if you’re looking at that one!)

Would be neat if the Framework marketplace could stock these!

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They’re readily available on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CVJPCQFJ/

As @Crystalyne said you’ll have to remove it from the carrier, but in this case it’s just a single screw so it’s easy to remove.

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Mine is supposed to come in tomorrow, I’ll update for people running Ubuntu 24.04 what my experience is with this.

Update: It got delayed, should be here Friday US Eastern time now.

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Thanks folks. As I zoomed in the image, I realized this would work.

I’m going to do some testing of my own. I like the idea of an Atheros option, especially new tech.

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You’ll want kernel 6.9 mini to have a correct behavior and then with 6.11 it will be even better, with the latest ath12k patch I can say now it’s working very good, very stable, high speed and the upload bug is gone

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Thanks for reporting.

Does it also work in AP mode, or only as STA? If AP, full 802.11be features, including MLO? Phoronix says MLO code just got pulled into 6.11 branch, but didn’t explain if it was STA or AP functionality…

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I can confirm that this patch fixes the crashing issue. That said, I’m still able to get faster speeds from an AX210 wifi card. I’m only able to get ~300Mbit upload and ~500Mbit download on 5Ghz and 6Ghz, but had a weird issue on 6Ghz where initially I was getting ~2Mbit but upon reconnecting it got back up to ~500Mbit.

Note I tested this using linux-mainline on Arch with ~5 patches applied including this one; the others were needed for this change to merge correctly. I’ll post the details later for anyone interested.

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Been testing on Ubuntu 24.04 over the weekend with the Mainline 6.9.9 kernel (I haven’t had the time to compile the kernel with patches yet), and I’m pulling down 600Mbs, and getting an upload of around 60Mbs, however this may actually be a limitation of the AP I have (given I get similar results on my phone with built in Wifi 7). I may need to look into getting a better AP to test it better.

However, regardless I’m pretty happy, it’s a much better result than what I was getting with the Wifi card module that came with my AMD 13" framework (about 200/25). And so far it also hasn’t randomly disappeared after being suspended (which the original module did all the time to me).