QCA6174 on Asus Z170I Pro Gaming

[Michal Kazior]

On 18 January 2016 at 19:39, Per Östlund <perost86 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to get the wifi on my Asus Z170I Pro Gaming to work, but haven't
> had any luck so far.
>
> lspci says:
> Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless
> Network Adapter [168c:003e] (rev 32)
> Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device [1043:86cd]
>
> I'm using the 4.4 kernel, on Arch Linux 64-bit (linux-4.4-3 package from
> testing repo). Out of the box ath10k doesn't work at all, complaining that
> it can't find firmware-5.bin. Copying firmware-4.bin to firmware-5.bin gets
> me further, with dmesg saying this:

Please, don't do that. It's pointless.

ath10k has a fallback system. If it doesn't find firmware-5.bin it'll
look for -4, -3, -2 as well. The message you see in the kernel log is
just a side effect of how to kernel API works at this time.


> [ 4237.917517] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: pci irq msi interrupts 1 irq_mode 0
> reset_mode 0
> [ 4238.139726] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for
> ath10k/cal-pci-0000:05:00.0.bin failed with error -2
> [ 4238.139742] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for
> ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/firmware-5.bin failed with error -2
> [ 4238.139745] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: could not fetch firmware file
> 'ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/firmware-5.bin': -2
> [ 4238.202052] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for
> ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board-2.bin failed with error -2
> [ 4240.318396] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: qca6174 hw3.2 (0x05030000,
> 0x00340aff sub 1043:86cd) fw WLAN.RM.2.0-00180-QCARMSWPZ-1 fwapi 4 bdapi 1
> htt-ver 3.26 wmi-op 4 htt-op 3 cal otp max-sta 32 raw 0 hwcrypto 1 features
> wowlan,ignore-otp,no-4addr-pad

You have the hw3.2. It is sensitive to board data files (board.bin /
board-2.bin).


> [ 4240.318399] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: debug 0 debugfs 1 tracing 0 dfs 0
> testmode 0
> [ 4243.317764] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: could not suspend target (-11)
> [ 4243.378790] ath: EEPROM regdomain: 0x6c
> [ 4243.378794] ath: EEPROM indicates we should expect a direct regpair map
> [ 4243.378796] ath: Country alpha2 being used: 00
> [ 4243.378797] ath: Regpair used: 0x6c
> [ 4243.380678] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0 wlp5s0: renamed from wlan0

Looks okay.


> [ 4365.040838] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: pci irq msi interrupts 1 irq_mode 0
> reset_mode 0
> [ 4365.264862] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for
> ath10k/cal-pci-0000:05:00.0.bin failed with error -2
> [ 4365.327022] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for
> ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board-2.bin failed with error -2

Looks like you reloaded the driver and nothing actually happened in
between. Perhaps your syslog (or journald I suppose) filtered some
messages?


>
> The interface can't be brought up though:
> # ip link set wlp5s0 up
> RTNETLINK answers: Resource temporarily unavailable

The kernel log doesn't really match what you're doing here.

The error is EAGAIN (11). This is very likely due to a FW timeout
which would be seen in the kernel log.

The most common reason FW times out on QCA6174 hw3.2 is incorrect
board file. The reason is the default board.bin doesn't work with
hw3.2 and the board-2.bin doesn't include the proper mappings either
yet (see the other thread in the archives - there's a lot of similar
complaints).


> I've tried various other firmwares (kvalo's, and other ones in the pull
> requests for his repo), but they either give me a "found invalid board
> magic" error or doesn't work any better than the one I got with the

That's what you get when you rename files however you like. You
probably wanted to use board.bin as board-2.bin file, right? This
won't work.


> linux-firmware package. I tried extracting the firmware myself from the
> Windows drivers from Asus, which had both qca61x4_1_1_2.bin and
> qca61x4_2_2.bin, using the instructions from [1]. The first failed with
> "failed to receive control response completion, polling..", the second
> worked as well as the one in linux-firmware.

You encoded the binary incorrect probably.

The problem you're facing isn't firmware problem per se. It is board
file problem most likely.


> The Asus driver also comes with a lot of eeprom-files, and I didn't know
> which one to use. So I wrote a script that copied each one to
> /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board-2.bin and reloaded the driver, but
> all of them failed with the invalid board magic error.

Yada yada. board-2.bin is TLV formatted. The eeprom files are
basically board.bin files (the API1 board files). You need to remove
board-2.bin and use the eeprom files from windows driver as board.bin.

You can actually figure out which one to use if you look at the .inf
file in the windows driver. There's a section containing mappings for
vendor/product ids (including subsystem ids, which is 1043:86cd in
your case which can be seen in both ath10k print and lspci).


Michał