Intel BE200 WiFi 7 on Pi 5 with RaspAP with Error Probe with Driver iwlwifi Failed with Error -22

[RodrigoP]

 Greetings!

I just purchased an Intel BE200 WiFi 7 card for my Raspberry Pi so that I could set it up as a WiFi router using RaspAP based on an article that I read on ZDNet.  I have an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5 to which I added the ZDE ZP590A PCIe to M.2 E Key HAT and an Intel BE200 card.  I then imaged a micro-SD card with RaspAP and booted up the system.  I installed the iwlwifi driver package and restarted the Pi 5.

When it booted up, I ran lspci and it displayed the information for the BE200 as expected.  Yay!  I then ran the dmesg command to see how the boot process went for the card and received the following error:

[    3.845092] iwlwifi 0001:01:00.0: probe with driver iwlwifi failed with error -22

I Googled the error message and tried all of the recommended fixes to no avail.  During the search, the AI answer mentioned that the latest revisions of the BE200 were not compatible with the iwlwifi drivers and recommended downgrading the kernel to v6.6 as the drivers were more generic and would work.

So, next I downgraded the kernel to v6.6 and ran dmesg again to see what happened and it returned some different error messages and indicated that it could not find the correct driver version for the BE200 card.  As I recall it wanted to load 80, so I searched and searched for that version but was unable to locate it.  Along the way I saw another response that mentioned kernel v6.12, so I upgraded to that version and tried again.  This time dmesg apparently found the correct version of the driver but then reported that the checksum/signature (I forget what it is actually called) for the driver didn't match what it was expecting so it thought that it was corrupted and wouldn't load it.  To try to solve this I downloaded the iwlwifi drivers from another repo and tried again with the same results.

This leaves me stuck in the current situation.  Kernel v6.6 and v6.12 won't successfully load the driver from the iwlwifi driver package and with the current version of RaspAP, kernel v6.18, I get the error -22 as shown above.

Are there any recommendations for how to get the BE200 card drivers to successfully load?  I'm all ears at this point.

Thanks for any insight that you can provide! 

[RodrigoP]

Update:

Well, I was able to get the drivers to load under kernel v6.12 by finding a different repo and redownloading them.  I checked file sizes and sure enough, they were different from what I had previously downloaded and installed.  So, after installing the new drivers (blobs) in the /lib/firmware directory and rebooting, the drivers were successfully loaded for the BE200 card and it was up and running.  Finally, I made some progress!  I rechecked dmesg and found that the card was looking for driver 93, but that was not in the current package, so it fell back to 92, but that version worked.

Having succeeded here, I figured that I could now get the current version of RaspAP working too.  So, I created a new RaspAP image using the Raspberry Pi imager application, booted it up, enabled the PCIe interface, loaded up the new driver set for the BE200, and rebooted.  Once the Pi came back up, I checked lspci and all was good there so I redid dmesg to see if the drivers were loaded, but much to my dismay, I was back to the probe error -22.  Again, I ran through the Google-recommended fixes but none made any difference.

So, it sounds like the one Google search response saying that the current revision of the BE200 card isn't compatible with kernel v6.18 may just be correct.  I'll continue my project setup with kernel v6.12 for now, but would really like to be running the current Pi OS with LTS.

[JedG_Intel]

Hello RodrigoP,

Thank you for posting on Intel Community Forum.

I understand that you are encountering driver probe failures with error -22 while attempting to use the Intel BE200 card with RaspAP on your Raspberry Pi 5. I appreciate you bringing this to our attention.

To help further troubleshoot the issue, may I kindly ask you to try the following steps:

Install the following firmware files:

iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-101

iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0.pnvm

Once these steps have been completed, please check if the issue persists. If the problem continues, feel free to let me know, and I will be glad to assist you further.

Best regards,

Jed G.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[RodrigoP]

Jed,

Thanks very much for getting back to me.

The files that you mentioned are installed in the /lib/firmware directory so they are available to the system; however, it still throws  the probe error -22.

[JedG_Intel]

Hi RodrigoP,

Thank you for your feedback. I’ll take a closer look into the matter and will get back to you as soon as I have an update or if I need any additional details.

In the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.

Best regards

Jed G.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[RodrigoP]

Jed,

I appreciate your working on this.  I will stand by for further updates.

I’m always happy to try things out to gather more information for troubleshooting.  Just let me know what you need. 

[JedG_Intel]

Hello RodrigoP,

I’ve sent you an email to gather additional information and to continue providing support. Please check your inbox at your earliest convenience.

Best regards,

Jed G.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[RodrigoP]

Thank you, Jed.

This is a very busy week for me, so I won't be able to get the requested info for you until Saturday.  Please hold the ticket open until then.

[JedG_Intel]

Hi RodrigoP,

Thank you for the update. No worries at all, I completely understand and am happy to wait until the requested information becomes available. Kindly share it with me at your earliest convenience.

Best regards,

Jed G.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[RodrigoP]

Jed,

I got a chance to check on things on my RaspAP setup on my Raspberry Pi 5 today.

I checked the kernel version and I was on 6.18.33, which was unable to load the BE200 driver.  When I checked today, kernel version 6.18.36 was available and so I updated to that.  After rebooting, I checked everything and dmesg reported the following:

perezrg@RaspAP-Pi5:~ $ dmesg | grep iwlwifi

[    4.539709] iwlwifi 0001:01:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)

[    4.542602] iwlwifi 0001:01:00.0: Detected crf-id 0x2001910, cnv-id 0x2001910 wfpm id 0x80000000

[    4.542670] iwlwifi 0001:01:00.0: PCI dev 272b/00f4, rev=0x472, rfid=0x112200

[    4.542676] iwlwifi 0001:01:00.0: Detected Intel(R) Wi-Fi 7 BE200 320MHz

[    4.542883] iwlwifi 0001:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-gl-c0-fm-c0-c99.ucode failed with error -2

[    4.568288] iwlwifi 0001:01:00.0: loaded firmware version 101.6ef20b19.0 gl-c0-fm-c0-101.ucode op_mode iwlmld

[    5.099758] iwlwifi 0001:01:00.0: Detected RF FM, rfid=0x112200

[    5.212173] iwlwifi 0001:01:00.0: base HW address: a0:85:27:78:f5:5a

So, as you can see, it tried to load driver version c99, which failed because it isn’t installed with the Intel firmware files, but was successful with 101 as you recommended.

So, the driver is now loaded and the card is functioning as a WiFi AP on 2.4 GHz, but this raises another issue.  I am unable to utilize the 5 and 6 GHz bands for AP use due to the driver not allowing me to fully set the location to the U.S.

My understanding is that is because of Intel’s Loacation-Aware Regulatory mechanism, LAR, which locks out the BE200 from broadcasting on the higher bands.  Older Intel drivers allowed this lock to by bypassed, but the new ones apparently do not.  So, I have two questions:

1. Is there any way to get the BE200, on the current 101 driver, to allow for access and broadcast on the 5 and 6 GHz bands?
2. Do you know of a repository that has the older verisions of the iwlwifi drivers and is there a way to force RaspAP to load them?  If not, I could downgrade the kernel to get them to work.

Thanks for your help in getting me this far.  It’s better than nothing, but still quite disappointing that I cannot take full advantage of the card’s functionality.