Update on Intel BE200 card drivers in linux distro - new bluetooth firmware

[jarvaz]

Hello

I open this thread not to question anything but to spread the good news that with the updated firmware for the bluetooth part of the chipset the iwlwifi for BE200 became stable at least for my normal use. I ahve been using only the bluetooth part and replaced the wifi with a usb wifi pen because the drivers conflited and cause lag in bluetooth items like mouses and with both parts in use the wifi worked badly . The test I used was to try an ookla speedtest and it was not possible to complete it and the lag in bluetooth mouse became notorious. With wifi card off it was possible to work.

Now it all seems to work as expected.

Using Pop_OS 22.04 but the synptoms were there in all distro tested with the ilwifi commit updated in mar 19.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/commit/?id=d3cc8b9b304af1671d47726f77177c28067d5c04

For the moment I think the bluetooth files must be updated manually because the linux-firmware file has to be updated

[drujd]

For me, the wifi part is still completely broken (doesn't work at all and prevents shutdown or wake from sleep) even with the new Bluetooth firmware. As for Bluetooth, LE Audio (or the features it depends on, isochronous channels) is still completely broken. This is on Kernel 6.8.2, newest linux-firmware from master branch and even tried bluez master branch...

Onm Windows, everything works perfectly fine.

[windows_guru]

Linux is not as widely used as Windows so driver support for hardware may be slower

Most use Linux on older rigs instead of the leading edge

[drujd]

Have you considered just NOT posting anything when you have nothing of substance to share?

BE200 has been supported in Linux for roughly half a year. There are just (known) issues with certain hardware combinations (e.g. AMD motherboards). Many people are already using BE200 without problems on Linux...

[jarvaz]

This card is probably not compatible with too old equipment. Its is not the case on my setup even though it is not the last on and it has six years. But the question is more of "tuning" the drivers to be capable of working.

It was working but conflicting inside the card (only bluetooth worked normally when wifi part was put to use the lag on bluetooth mouse was added to the connections malfunction - my test was simply try a speedtest that was never completed. And it couldn't connect normally to internet.

Now with the last bluetooth firmware it is working normally - kernel 6.8.0-76060800daily20240311-generic.

It is possible that not all setups work well - tried an elementaryOS that worked better than my Pop_OS (I changed for it although there was still the bluettoth problems I reported before - My Pop_OS used when I changed the card had some trouble with it and never worked well with the card Ihad to change and later I tried again

[drujd]

On Windows, everything works well (again, except the LE Audio part, but that's how it is for everyone save some specific laptop owners as far as I can tell from forums/Reddit), so this seems certainly like a Linux kernel/driver/firmware issue/bug. There are people with much older motherboards than mine that are running BE200 without problems. There IS some incompatibility between AMD mobos and this card ( https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/intel-has-a-new-driver-for-wi-fi-7-adapters-but-they-may-still-not-work-on-amd-systems ) and it seems it is already fixed for Windows, I just wonder when/if this will get fixed on Linux as well.

Linux distro itself should not matter, it's about version of kernel, firmware & bluez (for the Bluetooth part) it ships with (and patches it uses on top of the upstream versions).

[jarvaz]

I accept it should not matter which distro bit it did. When I found my troubles I could not make it work in pop_os and i use it for years. Some of the latest distros did nota recognise the card in livre CD mode and even if installed. I made a list of a few that worked for me. Only when I installed new my pop_os i had some stability with the WiFi off. But pop_os is updated but delaying an upgrade for lateral because of distro changes.
Only made the pista to try to help as I came to the fórum trying to fins the reason for the troubles.
I read about Windows bit dont use it in the laptop for some time - it came with it but Iprefe linux