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

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

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).

Could anybody verify that if the NCM865 supports cis-central and cis-peripheral via running btmgmt info? That’s crucial for LE Audio and the NFA765 I previously got didn’t support these two.

Just ran it:

supported settings:
powered connectable fast-connectable discoverable bondable link-security ssp br/edr le advertising secure-conn debug-keys privacy static-addr phy-configuration cis-central cis-peripheral

current settings:
powered ssp br/edr le secure-conn cis-central cis-peripheral iso-broadcaster sync-receiver

What AP’s are y’all running ? I get 2400mbit from the rz616/mtk7922 to Qualcomm wifi6 AP’s and 1200mbit to Broadcom based ones. It sounds more like your AP situation is causing problems with the speeds you are posting.

The BE based AP’s (found in ASUS and TPlink) have proven very much to be steps backwards in my experience from the wifi6 kit on the market and would advise avoiding. For reference I am using combinations of ax89x and XT8 from asus.

Thank you so much!

Just got my Qualcomm WIFI 7 card. On Fedora 40 so current kernel is 6.9.9 and yeah, heavy traffic will kill the network. And sometimes it hard crashes and nothing is responding… only a hard shutdown got me out of it.

In Windows 11, it works fine but it’s slower than my AX210.

My AP is a TPLINK EAP773 which is wifi 7.

I’m using a UniFi U7 Pro but with a 1Gbit uplink/network. However if the AP was the problem I would expect the same performance from all the cards.

Additionally, you mentioned that you’re using an RZ616 card which is WiFi 6E; we’re discussing WiFi 7 cards specifically.

all my ap’s have 2.5 or 10gbit uplinks, I’ve got some bpi-r4 's i’m waiting for the mtk wifi7 RF boards to install. But that’s taking longer than I was hoping. I guess my point is that the speeds you’re reporting with the current batch of wifi7 cards isn’t building much confidence in achieving better than what i’m getting with the last generation radios and clients. I might get a qcn board to do some testing with my bpi-r4’s so am interested. From the openwrt lists I’ve been following the qcn drivers have a lot of optimisation to be done.

Will be fixed in linux 6.11. just tested the patch and working more stable + faster than 6.10

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Can’t wait! Fedora is usually pretty quick to roll new versions out, but who knows. I don’t think it’s worth me pulling the NCM865 out until 6.11 comes out on Fedora officially. Most of what I do wont saturate the bandwidth - except for maybe updates.

Does it also fix the BT audio issue you listed in your OP?

EDIT:
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/?packages=kernel&page=1

If I am interpreting this correctly, it seems like there isn’t any kernel 6.11.x for Fedora 40. The last Fedora 40 kernel listed is kernel-6.9.10-200.fc40 which is in the testing → stable stage 5 days ago.

6.10 and 6.11 seem to be for Fedora 41.

We have 6.11 now on Fedora. Still locking up with heavy traffic. :frowning:

Edit: I was wrong. I actually have 6.9.11. I got a bit too excited. :unamused:

I did a video on the behavior since I couldn’t find one myself.

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This is version 6.9.11 on Fedora 40, not 6.11.

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I edited it before you replied

If you want to test 6.11 on fedora, there are pre-release builds available in the rawhide repo.

Check you have enough space in your /boot filesystem, then something like this should get you the new kernel:

dnf --setopt=installonly_limit=4 --enablerepo rawhide up kernel

(assuming you haven’t changed the default installonly_limit config from the default of 3, doing this so you don’t lose one of your older kernels)

Once you’re done testing with the pre-release kernel you can boot into a “production” version and then manually dnf rm the set of kernel* packages from the rawhide version.

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