question regarding qca2066 and qca206x (Steam Deck OLED/Galileo) on upstream kernels

[Matthew Schwartz]

Hello,

I've been tinkering with my Steam Deck OLED (Galileo revision) quite a
bit since release, and I think I am finally running into some trouble
that I am unable to resolve regarding the use of the Galileo's
ath11k/qca2066 driver alongside other devices on an upstream Linux
kernel, specifically Linux 6.9.0 and later.

When I try to use the upstream ath11k driver with my OLED Deck, it
ends up failing a direct firmware load for ath11k/QCA2066/amss.bin.
The upstream driver has never worked (to the best of my knowledge at
least), so that is not a regression. I've attached the dmesg from this
failure just as a reference. We used to get around this on kernels 6.6
-> 6.8 by adding in a separate QCA206X entry via kernel patch:
https://github.com/Nobara-Project/rpm-sources/blob/main/baseos/kernel/6.8.7/steamdeck-oled-wifi.patch
along with the firmware from
https://steamdeck-packages.steamos.cloud/archlinux-mirror/jupiter-main/os/x86_64/linux-firmware-neptune-jupiter.20231113.1-1-any.pkg.tar.zst
but I have not been able to rebase this onto Kernel 6.9 without a host
of compile failures in ath11k, which are unfortunately a bit beyond my
own knowledge level.

The only way I've managed to get wifi working on the kernel has been
to use this one commit from Valve
https://gitlab.com/evlaV/linux-integration/-/commit/15dc5e42cac7240104b42443df8f4091721da5b1,
along with the QCA206X firmware folder on top of upstream Linux 6.9.0.
Please correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is marked as
[NOT-FOR-UPSTREAM] because it will break devices using the proper
upstream ath11k firmware, right? Do you know if a solution is being
worked on to fix the upstream drivers for compatibility with the
Galileo specific hardware chip, or is this workaround going to be the
only way to get working wifi on new kernel releases?

Cheers,

Matthew Schwartz
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