ath10k firmware crashes in mesh mode on QCA9880

[Alexis Green]

Thank you for your help Rajkumar,

We've traced the problem down to a peering issue. Looks like there was
a missing compile flag that caused some kind of incongruence. My best
guest is that beacons are generated by firmware and advertise support
for AC mode, whereas wpa_supplicant, when not compiled with
CONFIG_IEEE80211AC=y, sends mesh peering messages and creates peers
without AC support, causing firmware to get confused. After
recompiling supplicant with the correct flag, no more crashes were
observed in casual testing. I submitted a pull request to LEDE to,
hopefully, fix it in upstream.

Best regards,

Alexis

On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 3:51 PM, Manoharan, Rajkumar
<rmanohar at qca.qualcomm.com> wrote:
>> Tested the 10.2.4.70.59-2 firmware and wpa_supplicant running WITHOUT
>> encryption and it still crashes. I suspect this means wpa_supplicant is setting up
>> the interface incorrectly and/or transmitting a malformed packet that is causing
>> the driver to crash.
>>
> Ben,
>
> IIRC mesh support was validated in qca988x in VHT mode while ago.  Either it could
> be regression in driver/fw or lede mac80211 package.
>
> 1) Could you please try plain backports in lede w/o applying ath10k patches.
>      I do see 160MHz support in LEDE.
> 2) There are some peer stats dump from your earlier log. Disable peer stats
>      by "peer_stats" debugfs.
> 3) Please confirm the behavior with older firmware revisions.
> 4) use iw to bring up open mesh to rule out wpa_s config
>
> -Rajkumar
>