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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

The Framework wifi card for Intel is an AX201 implementation, which means the only thing on the card is the RF and the rest of the wireless functions are in the Intel SoC. You can't use an AX201 with anything but an Intel platform because of CNVi.

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The modern/hardware equivalent of a WinModem.

Oh man. I completely and I mean completely forgot about the Winmodem.

A good quip but an imperfect analogy. As WinModem victims may remember, the WinModem DSP was in software. No part of a CNVi radio is in software. It is only a question as to which circuit board contains which parts of the wireless stack.

Still, it seems like it is a kind of lock-in (intel only), to save 10 cents or something. What's expensive about standalone wifi?

“inModem” then, because it’s Intel that needs to supply the brains rather than windows

OP did say hardware equivalent

We've used the Intel AX210 on everything except the original 11th Gen pre-built systems which use AX201 and the Chromebook Edition, which uses AX211.

AX210 on Ryzen is a YMMV situation. Neither Intel nor AMD will provide any guidance or support around the combination, and we don't have access to any of the needed source to resolve issues as they come up.

I've been using an AX210 on a Ryzen based laptop since early 2022.

I initially had issues with it causing the laptop to lockup hard, if iwlwifi module (AX210 driver) was loaded, on resume from suspend to disk. It was easy to work around using a hook script to down the interface and unload the module before suspend, and reload + up interface if it had been up at time of suspend. S3 suspend to ram / resume worked fine without the hack.

Currently 6.1 kernel (Debian testing). When I initially put the work around in place it was IIRC 5.6 kernel, so maybe not an issue anymore, but haven't bothered checking to see.

I only bought an Intel AX210 because it was cheapest tri-band card. The Intel card is pretty gimped (broken AP modes, breakage due to issues "magically" determining regulatory domain, Intel removed functionality in recent driver versions that could somewhat work around the first two issues so now impossible to mitigate, etc.). I would probably try a Mediatek card, if doing this today (in spite of my general policy of avoiding Mediatek). Last I checked, the equivalent Atheros chipset still had poor free driver support?!

"It was easy..." - that doesn't sound that easy to me. I've honestly never had to do something like that to get linux working. Or maybe I'm too lazy and tried to work around things like that.

You just drop a script into a "special" directory, and the scripts are run in alphabetical order with arguments that tell them if they are being called for a suspend or resume, and the type of suspend. Non-systemd, it is part of the acpi stuff. Systemd has its own special dir '/usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep' (there is no equivalent under /etc; and creating one yourself will not work). I don't recall the directory the acpi hook scripts used (it has been a while... ?something like /etc/acpid/hooks.d?), but it worked pretty much the same way. Supposedly you can use systemd targets to accomplish the same, but when I tried that, it was very unreliable-- apparently unreliable for others too since the special systemd dir exists, and the distribution is using it for its own hooks (Poettering has said it might go away at some point, though :/).

The original dumb version (written in anger, after the first time the laptop crashed on resume post installing the Intel card, and a bit of testing to isolate it to the iwlwifi module) was just a few lines-- literally a couple minutes to write. It has grown since to about 10X the size to handle some details specific to my network setup more intelligently.

Huh really? I put an AX210 wifi 6E card in my absolutely ancient Intel i7-2600 Optiplex and it works great.

Reading intel ark, it seem to me that the AX210 is a fully fledged device that can be used with every SoC [0] while the AX201 relies on CNVi [1].

So both can be true at the same time: your AX210 works fine with the i7-2600, while the AX201 would not.

Thanks for those product names Intel. Very helpful!

0: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/204836/... 1: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/130293/...

As I understand it, the AX2X0 cards will work with any CPU, while the AX2X1 cards need CNVi support (so a newer intel SoC)

Luckily I ordered the AX210 over the AX211 because the AX210 was cheaper. :P

Yes, really. Cnvi cards only work on recent Intel cpus and they’re a tad cheaper.

The problem is not Intel branded cards. Your card (ending with 0) is non-cnvi. Try an AX211 and it won’t work.

This is good info.

It would be nicer if they rephrased it "non-intel locked" to properly assign blame for the lack of modularity. This isn't a Ryzen thing.

Are there any technical advantages to doing that? I guess it makes the wifi chipset cheaper to manufacture, but wouldn't it increase the cost of the CPU?

I think it's part of the intel management system.

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