topic Re: Intel BE200 WiFi 7 M.2 card causing boot failure on 3 motherboards out of 4 in Wireless

Intel BE200 WiFi 7 M.2 card causing boot failure on 3 motherboards out of 4

jrobin28260 — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 12:51:32 GMT

Hello there,

Just trying to know if I'm missing something, or to report in case it's useful.

I can confirm the card is working, because it works fine on 1 of my computers (both as WiFi and Bluetooth).

But in 3 of my computers, the UEFI/BIOS get stuck (screen turns on after a very long time, I hear the beep, then nothing more happens).

I'm interested in case any trick can be attempted to solve this (be it a firmware update, a BIOS setting or I don't know).

About this Intel® BE200NGW based card, here are the markings

Intel® Killer™ BE1750x
Intel® BE200NGW
Anatel: 06538-23-04423
T PN: G86C0008A810
SPS: XXXXXX-XXX XX
FRU: 5W11H85463
WFM: 105FADF8D3BA
BDM: 105FADF8D3BE
TA: N28353-003
MM: 99C477

Under the QR Code:

Scanning the QR Code says 8SSW11H85141T1SS45H065T
8SSW11H85141
T1SS45H065T
EC: 6653678
Made in China

Bottom-right corner:

IC: 1000M-BE200NG
FCC ID: PD9BE200NG

Obtained through Amazon.fr (ships from Amazon, sold by Amazon).

About my motherboard on which the card is working fine:

Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P rev 2.x on BIOS version FD from 2016/02/26 (CPU is AMD FX8350).
Intel BE200 card is shown as 8086:272b as PCI Vendor:Device ID
Connected using a PCI-Express X1 <-> M.2 Key E adapter with USB front panel connector cable for Bluetooth

About my motherboards on which the card is blocking the boot process:

MSI X470 GAMING PLUS MAX (MS-7B79) on BIOS version 7B79vHK / H.K0 (AGESA ComboAm4v2PI 1.2.0.Ca) (from 2024/07/23). CPU is Ryzen 7 3700X
Asus TUF GAMING B550-PLUS on BIOS version 3607 (AGESA ComboV2PI 1.2.0.Ca) (from 2024/03/18). CPU is Ryzen 5 5500
Lenovo Laptop 81W4 15ARE05 on BIOS version DZCN49WW (2023/09/19). CPU is Ryzen 5 4500U

I can provide more specific details if asked.

Already tried:

Resizable BAR enabled/disabled
Above 4G decoding enabled/disabled
USB cable for Bluetooth connected/disconnected
Every available PCIe port

Thank you in advance!

Best regards

Re: Intel BE200 WiFi 7 M.2 card causing boot failure on 3 motherboards out of 4

jrobin28260 — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 22:22:57 GMT

By looking on the Internet about this subject, I found out many others people are facing the same issue

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/1cinpvm/be200_wifi_7_working_on_am2/

https://community.amd.com/t5/processors/amd-and-wifi-7/td-p/657636

https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/intel-has-a-new-driver-for-wi-fi-7-adapters-but-they-may-still-not-work-on-amd-systems

https://community.intel.com/t5/Wireless/Laptop-doesn-t-boot-with-BE200/m-p/1571613

And even more discussions about it are available online.

WiFi board firmware update?

Is there some kind of WiFi board firmware flash upgrade available about this Intel® Killer™ BE1750x / Intel® BE200NGW WiFi card? Because I'm not sure, I believe firmware files for most cards are just dynamically loaded by the driver but not flashed into the chip.

As I have a computer available on which this card is working, I may be interested to know if the WiFi card may be flashed to a newer firmware, just in case, to check again.

I would also be interested in having access some kind of UEFI/BIOS debugging console (through serial port / UART TTL for example) to collect some more information by connecting a 2nd computer, about what is blocking here, but anyway this may be going out of scope here.

Thank you in advance for any information.

Re: Intel BE200 WiFi 7 M.2 card causing boot failure on 3 motherboards out of 4

jrobin28260 — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 11:03:03 GMT

I've tried some more things:

Plugging the WiFi card in place of the GPU (and trying to boot without the GPU), as it is connected to the CPU instead of chipset
Plugging the WiFi card in place of the GPU (and trying to boot with the GPU on another port)
Hot plugging the WiFi card (at GRUB level depending on which port is used, the screen goes blank or not, but anyway after loading kernel + initramfs, it fails to go further)
Hot plugging the WiFi card once the OS has booted (but apart from Bluetooth becoming visible, even `echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/rescan` did nothing into dmesg logs, or into lspci output.
Reducing the speed of PCIe ports to Gen 1
Enable/Disable ASPM from BIOS
Enable/Disable Data Link Feature Exchange from BIOS
Enable/Disable SR-IOV from BIOS

On the ASUS B550 based motherboard there is some COM_DEBUG port which is UART/TTL but according to this, its only outputting gibberish/binary unless you manually do anything specific with it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnm_tuARqVI

On the MSI X470 based mother board the only debugging port seems to be JSPI1 which seems to be available to boot a BIOS using another SPI flash...

Still interested in anything that should be tried!

Re: Intel BE200 WiFi 7 M.2 card causing boot failure on 3 motherboards out of 4

jrobin28260 — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 21:37:44 GMT

It turns out the COM_DEBUG port of my B550 based Asus motherboard is more interesting than expected, as it's providing Q-Codes

So I used a device connected to it to record each byte and timestamp, in order to compare and debug boot attempts.

I added some white lines to align the same blobs of Q-Codes despite slight differences between boots, and placed everything into a spreadsheet (attached) to spot differences and timings. See https://www.asusqcodes.com/ for example for Q-Codes meaning.

In presence of the blocking Intel BE200 WiFi card, the boot process almost entirely occurs before stopping at the really final steps.

Looks like the really long time before having the screen turning on is spent waiting between code 07 (AP initialization after microcode loading) to 99 (Super IO Initialization).

Both of these 2 Q-Codes (07 and 99) appears several times, not always as slow.

It eventually runs aground when going from code A0 to A2 to A0 again: got A0 (IDE initialization is started), A2 (IDE Detect), then nothing more is happening.