ath11k: IPQ6018: support for 802.11s MESH

[Stefan Zegenhagen]

Dear Kalle, dear all,

I can understand your concern regarding unknown patches. I've checked
carefully that there's no OpenWRT patch on the ath11k driver that could
possibly cause this behaviour. Most patches are vanilla kernel
backports, others do harmless things like
 - disabling coldboot calibration on IPQ6018
 - setting FW memory mode via DTB
 - tweaking QRTR instance IDs to allow multiple ath11k cards to be used

However, vanilla kernel still requires numerous patches to actually
work on the Mango board. So it's difficult to test without any patches,
since the IPQ6018 is a built-in AHB core and I cannot simply plug it
somewhere else.

Could you please at least answer the question whether mesh is supposed
to be working on IPQ6018 with vanilla kernel, which firmware version is
required and whether it is required to enable raw mode data path? Is
there some knowledge around? With ath10k, there was at least a WMI
services file in debugfs and a feature list in the 'bin' file. Both are
no longer available and I can no longer see anything about firmware
capabilities.


Kind regards,
Stefan


Am Montag, dem 08.07.2024 um 18:24 +0300 schrieb Kalle Valo:
> Stefan Zegenhagen <stefan.zegenhagen at azg-tech.com> writes:
> 
> > Dear all,
> > 
> > I've got an 8devices Mango board here with an IPQ6018 WiFi6 built-
> > in
> > via AHB and running kernel 6.6.35 with OpenWRT patches and firmware
> > WLAN.HK.2.5.0.1-03982-QCAHKSWPL_SILICONZ-3.
> > 
> > Somehow I can't get mesh support running as it should. Tried
> > loading
> > ath11k with frame_mode=1 which leads to association via MGMT frames
> > working fine but afterwards no more frames are received and
> > associated
> > peers time out.
> > 
> > When loading ath11k with frame_mode=0 (raw), association works well
> > and
> > afterwards I'm able to transmit frames with sufficient rates, but
> > RX
> > hardly works and spews loads of kernel messages.
> > 
> > Is mesh supposed to be working at all with ath11k cards? (See below
> > for
> > more info.)
> 
> We can't give distro support, we only support kernel.org. If you are
> using OpenWrt patches you should ask them, we don't know what changes
> there are.
>