SIM in illegal state, uqmi/qmi broken? [was Re: Setting up a Quectel RM520GL-N on a Banana Pi R4-Pro]

[Luca Olivetti]

El 15/3/26 a les 23:50, Philip Prindeville via openwrt-devel ha escrit:


> Sun Mar 15 16:46:33 2026 daemon.notice netifd: Interface 'qmi' is setting up now
> Sun Mar 15 16:46:33 2026 daemon.notice netifd: qmi (6753): Waiting for SIM initialization
> Sun Mar 15 16:46:33 2026 daemon.notice netifd: qmi (6753): SIM in illegal state - Power-cycling SIM


mmh, not the same modem, not the same system and (probably) not the same 
problem, but lately I'm getting a bunch of these "SIM in illegal state" 
messages, never happened with openwrt 24.x.

I think there's something wrong with either the qmi driver or uqmi (it 
could also be the modem firmware but, as I said, it didn't happen with 
openwrt 24.x).

The "SIM in illegal state" comes from /lib/netifd/proto/qmi.sh


         # Check if UIM application is stuck in illegal state
         local uim_state_timeout=0
         while true; do
                 json_load "$(uqmi -s -d "$device" -t 2000 
--uim-get-sim-state)"
                 json_get_var card_application_state card_application_state

                 # SIM card is either completely absent or state is 
labeled as illegal
                 # Try to power-cycle the SIM card to recover from this 
state
                 if [ -z "$card_application_state" -o 
"$card_application_state" = "illegal" ]; then
                         echo "SIM in illegal state - Power-cycling SIM"


and my hunch is that somewhat uqmi locks up, the command times out so it 
triggers the -z "$card_application_state" part of the condition, and 
power cycling the sim does nothing (in fact if uqmi is stuck it will 
never actually power cicle the sim, besides, most probably the sim isn't 
the problem).

My workaround is to reset the modem when I lose connectivity: I already 
had a cron job to test for it (it happened that the interface had an 
address but it stopped working) that simply restarted the interface, now 
it also resets the modem.
Note the commented out "uqmi ... --set-device-operating-mode reset" 
which didn't work (it never returned and I saw several instances runnnig 
by so many cron invocations,hence my hypothesis that it also fails in 
/lib/netifd/proto/qmi.sh):

#!/bin/sh
#logger "checkwan"

# wait 10 minutes after boot
[ $(awk -F "." '{print $1}' /proc/uptime) -lt "600" ] && exit 0
# wait 5 minutes after last attempt
find /tmp -name ltedown  -mmin +5 -exec rm \{\} \;
if [ -f /tmp/ltedown ] ; then
   logger "less than 5 minutes since last attempt"
   exit 0
fi
ping -q -c 1 8.8.8.8 > /dev/null && exit 0
ping -q -c 1 1.1.1.1 > /dev/null && exit 0
uqres=$(uqmi -d /dev/cdc-wdm0 -t 20000 --get-data-status)
logger "ping test failed, down/up wwan, uqmi says $uqres"
ifdown wwan
# Power cycle / Reset
echo "AT+CFUN=1,1" > /dev/ttyUSB2
sleep 20
#uqmi -s -d /dev/cdc-wdm0 --set-device-operating-mode reset
ifup wwan
touch /tmp/ltedown

Bye
--
Luca