Flint 3 (BE-9300) RNR missing from 5GHz Probe Responses which brakes 6GHz discovery on linux

Router
1

I am seeing a 6 GHz discovery issue with Flint 3 that appears to be caused by how Reduced Neighbor Report (RNR) is advertised.

The 5 GHz beacon correctly contains an RNR advertising the colocated 6 GHz BSS:

Tag: Reduced Neighbor Report
    Operating Class: 134
    Channel Number: 37
    BSSID: <6 GHz BSSID>
    Same SSID: True
    Co-Located AP: True
    MLD Link ID: 2

However, the corresponding 5 GHz Probe Response does not contain an RNR.

I confirmed this with monitor-mode packet captures.

This causes a practical interoperability issue with a Linux/iwd Wi-Fi 6E client.

From a cold state, the client only discovers/connects to the 5 GHz BSS.

If I explicitly perform a directed scan for the SSID on the known 6 GHz channel, the 6 GHz BSS is immediately discovered and works normally:

iw dev wlan0 scan freq 6135 ssid <SSID>

After that, association to 6 GHz works without any issue.

The behavior therefore looks like:

5 GHz beacon
  → RNR correctly advertises 6 GHz

5 GHz Probe Response
  → RNR missing

normal 6 GHz discovery
  → fails

directed 6 GHz SSID probe
  → succeeds

Could you check whether Flint 3 is supposed to include the 6 GHz RNR in both the 5 GHz Beacon and Probe Response?

It looks like adding the same RNR information to the Probe Response may fix 6 GHz discovery for clients that use the probe-response information during colocated-6-GHz scanning.

This is all happening with a 5+6GHz MLO AP and 4.10.1 firmware.

3

BTW the “fix“ is having the connection set as hidden, so the networkmanager discovers 6GHz without relying on RNR.

4

Hi,

Thank you for the detailed report.

Please SSH into the router and run the following commands to see whether they enable RNR in the 5 GHz Probe Response:

cfg80211tool wlan12 rnr 1
hostapd_cli -p /var/run/hostapd-wifi1 -i wlan12 update_beacon

If the issue persists, could you please send us a private message with a complete over-the-air packet capture of a connection attempt so that we can investigate further?

If possible, please also include:

  1. The Linux device model, OS distribution and version, Wi-Fi adapter model, and Wi-Fi driver version.
  2. The MAC addresses of the BE9300 and the Wi-Fi adapter, so we can identify them in the capture.