changing hw address of ath10k card

[Michal Kazior]

On 6 May 2015 at 12:39, Sebastian Gottschall <s.gottschall at dd-wrt.com> wrote:
> Hello

Hi,


> I recently stumbled across a problem in ath10k. while developing on embedded
> wireless routers
> i found a device which uses a ar988x card using a card embedded board
> eeprom. the problem is there is no way to override
> the cards hardware/mac address, which is required on that device since it
> uses just a fake mac on that board data.

If device contains valid EEPROM data then both calibration and mac
address is read using OTP. In that case a mere fake board template
binary is used by the driver (the default board.bin).

If device contains no valid EEPROM, which is the case for many routers
out in the wild e.g. TP-Link Archer C5/C7, you must provide a complete
board data. On routers this data is often stored on NAND/Flash
partitions. OpenWRT does handle this and extracts calibration data
file. If you fail to provide that and attempt to use the default
board.bin you'll get hardcoded mac and Tx/Rx performance will be very
poor most likely.

If ath10k assigns 00:03:07:12:34:56 mac address to the interface then
you've most likely provided a fake board template and the device
doesn't have a valid EEPROM data. Are you using skip_otp module
parameter by any chance or other hacks/custom patches on ath10k?


> is there any way/trick available to deal with that problem?

You can always change the mac address via `ip` or `ifconfig` commands
after interface is created but that's probably not what you really
want.


Michał