Fwd: AX500 support quirks

[Patricio Ferraggi Ares]

Hi Mark, thanks for answering back. Generally, I would agree with you
that newer hardware requires distros that update frequently to get
those drivers in, but in this situation, I find it very strange is the
other way around.

More updated distros like arch-based ones have no functioning BT,
while older distros like ubuntu-based ones have both working BT and
WiFi. It might be the case that the arch distros I tried simply did
not enable the modules you mentioned.
I am not sure what is going on.

I will give a try your recommendations and see if can make some progress.

Thanks

El jue, 27 ene 2022 a la(s) 14:28, Mark Herbert
(mark.herbert42 at gmail.com) escribió:
>
> I use Gentoo with very custom kernel (ath11k master-pending backported +
> more bleeding edge and experimental features). So it is hard for me to
> say why bnary distributes have it all so different.
>
> When I got my 9310 in August 2021 it was completely unisable because of
> ath11k no matter of distribution, but now the situation is quite
> different - thanks to Kalle and team.
>
> The only issue now is to wait till those new features will land into
> mainstream distributions which sometimes prefer to stay on so called
> "stable"  kernels for ages. They maybe stable if your hardware is  from
> stone age, but for new hardware like 9310 "stable"  kernel is stabe in
> only one aspect - it is not working and will never do.  In all
> distributions there are usually packages with newer "experimental"
> kernels that are available but will not be installed by default, but you
> can install the packages and enjoy working system.
>
>
> For ath11k /dell 9310 the best will be 5.17 which is in rc1 now, but I
> guess 5.16.3 released today will also be fully usable. Just need to get
> new firmware from Kalle's git as the firmware in linux firmware package
> is absolute junk more that 1 year old.
>
> As for bluetooth - it is working perfectly, but it is not an USB module
> as intel. It is hci_uart , so you need to have uart bt support built is
> as well as ath3k bt firmware loading and btqca extensions. And aldo the
> firmware is required (available in regular linux-firmware )
>
> Here is my log of bt initialization. All working well.
>
> [    4.930758] hci_uart_qca serial0-0: failed to acquire enable gpio
> [    4.932732] Bluetooth: hci0: setting up ROME/QCA6390
> [    4.936750] Bluetooth: hci0: Frame reassembly failed (-84)
> [    5.254533] Bluetooth: hci0: QCA Product ID   :0x00000010
> [    5.256045] Bluetooth: hci0: QCA SOC Version  :0x400a0200
> [    5.257636] Bluetooth: hci0: QCA ROM Version  :0x00000200
> [    5.259263] Bluetooth: hci0: QCA Patch Version:0x00000d2b
> [    5.260790] Bluetooth: hci0: QCA controller version 0x02000200
> [    5.262228] Bluetooth: hci0: QCA Downloading qca/htbtfw20.tlv
> [    6.210557] Bluetooth: hci0: QCA Downloading qca/htnv20.bin
> [    6.438691] Bluetooth: hci0: QCA setup on UART is completed
>
> On 1/27/22 15:29, Kalle Valo wrote:
> > Patricio Ferraggi Ares <pattferraggi at gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >> My name is Patricio, I am a fellow software developer and user of the
> >> Dell XPS 9310 (AX500 version). First of all, I wanted to thank you for
> >> all your hard work bringing support for this model, thanks to you, I
> >> have been able to use my laptop with Linux almost since I got it.
> >>
> >> This is not a bug report in any way, I just would like to gain some
> >> knowledge on the subject and you might be the perfect person for my
> >> questions.
> >>
> >> I noticed that although all distros use the Linux kernel, support for
> >> this hardware is not the same across all Linux distros. To be more
> >> specific, Ubuntu-based distros have had working wifi and Bluetooth for
> >> almost a year now, although there are some problems like resuming from
> >> deep sleep,  both wifi and Bluetooth work right away on installation,
> >> at the moment I am using Pop OS with Linux kernel 5.15.5 as my main
> >> driver. On the other hand, arch-based distros dont' have working BT,
> >> as you can see here and here. The wifi is working but Bluetooth
> >> sometimes doesn't turn on and when it does it cannot properly connect
> >> to devices. This happens across multiple arch-based distros and kernel
> >> versions, even if I try kernel versions that work fine in PopOS, they
> >> don't in Arch.
> >>
> >> So finally, my questions:
> >>
> >> Why is there this inconsistency of support between distros when
> >> theoretically, they are all Linux?
> >> Why is it that if Arch is always updated, in this particular case
> >> their hardware support is lacking compared to ubuntu?
> > This is something you need to ask Ubuntu, or check from their git
> > history or package changelogs. But in general distros make changes to
> > the kernel, some of them even quite drastic, so behaviour between
> > distros can be different. My guess is that Ubuntu had custom changes to
> > ath11k, maybe they backported patches?
> >
> >> And finally, do you have a working configuration with wifi and
> >> Bluetooth? if that is the case could you tell me your distro, kernel,
> >> firmware, system firmware versions?
> > I also use Dell XPS 13 9310 with QCA6390 as my daily driver (no pun
> > intended) and I have no issues with wifi. BIOS is 3.1.0 from 07/22/2021.
> > I'm a debian guy so I have Debian 10 and use connman, but
> > network-manager should work as well. I compile my own kernel from my
> > ath.git master branch[1], but with QCA6390 I would expect stock v5.16
> > release to work fine. For WCN6855 I recommend to use v5.17.
> >
> > Firmware version is WLAN.HST.1.0.1-05266-QCAHSTSWPLZ_V2_TO_X86-1.
> >
> > I don't use Bluetooth so can't comment on that.
> >
> > [1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kvalo/ath.git/
> >