ath12k: recommended regulatory country source for embedded AP products?

[Vitor Soares]

Hello,

Adding a few Qualcomm contacts in Cc who may be able to help here, or point me
to the right people.


Thanks,
Vitor Soares

On Wed, 2026-07-29 at 10:29 +0100, Vitor Soares wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm integrationg the Silex SX-PCEBE module (Qualcomm WCN7850, ath12k) on the
> ARM-based Toradex Aquila SoM family, using a recent mainline kernel (7.2-rc).
> 
> Hardware/firmware: wcn7850 hw2.0 (PCI),
> WLAN.HMT.1.1.c7-00108-QCAHMTSWPL_V1.0_V2.0_SILICONZ_UPSTREAM-3
> (fw_version 0x1103006c).
> 
> I'm trying to understand the intended way to set the regulatory country for
> ath12k on embedded products where the country is configured by the integrator
> of
> our SoM or at deployment time by the end user.
> 
> My current understanding is that ath12k registers the wiphy as self-managed,
> but
> userspace regulatory hints, e.g. "iw reg", are ignored in
> ath12k_reg_notifier()
> unless CONFIG_ATH_REG_DYNAMIC_USER_REG_HINTS=y, which in turn depends on
> CONFIG_CFG80211_CERTIFICATION_ONUS.
> 
> The SMBIOS coounty-code path, looks intended for fixed regional SKUs, However,
> it is not available on our ARM platform.
> 
> So, I have 2 related questions:
> 
> 1 - Is the expected ath12k model for this type of product to enable 
> ATH_REG_DYNAMIC_USER_REG_HINTS and use userspace regulatory hints before
> starting hostapd, with the regulatory responsibility on the
> product/integrator?
> 
> 
> Or is there another mechanism you would recomment for this use case?
> 
> 2 - Since ath12k is a self-managed regulatory device and the firmware owns and
> enforces the regulatory database, is the CFG80211_CERTIFICATION_ONUS gate
> intended to apply to this case as well?
> 
> In other words, should a userspace-selected country for a self-managed ath12k
> device be treated the same as dynamic user regulatory hints for non-self-
> managed
> devices, or is this dependency inherited from the common ath regulatory model?
> 
> Without a country, the ath12k falls back to world "00", where 5 GHz AP
> operation
> is blocked by NO_IR.
> 
> Thanks,
> Vitor Soares
>