ath20k blocks other devices

[Michal Kazior]

On 15 May 2015 at 12:07, Brummfax <brummfax at posteo.org> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I bought a new Acer Aspire VN7-571G for my parents. As the new QCA6174
> Qualcomm Atheros Wifi/bluetooth (also known as QCNFA344) device is in
> use, I could not use Wifi with the usual Ubuntu 15.04 installation.
> Following
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1383184/comments/115 I
> compiled the new kernel with the ath10k driver and everything worked
> nicely at home with my Fritzbox 7490 router using the 5GHz band. At my
> parents place with a Fritzbox 3170 router I encounter the following
> problem. As soon as Ubuntu is connected to Wifi (using the 2,4 GHz band
> as there is no 5GHz band), other devices cannot connect to Wifi anymore.
> The ath10k driver blocks all other devices (Smartphones running Android,
> iPads) except for my personal laptop with a standard Ubuntu 14.10 system
> which can connect to Wifi for a couple of minutes before being
> disconnected as well. I can connect again but  will loose the connection
> after a couple of minutes. I've also installed Windows 8.1 on the Acer
> Aspire, and if I connect to Wifi using Windows, these problems
> disappear, i.e. all other devices can also connect to Wifi without any
> problems. I've also not seen these problems at home which could be
> related to the fact that the Acer Aspire was using the 5GHz band while
> the other devices where using the 2,4GHz band.

Can you get some sniff logs and possibly wpa_supplicant verbose logs
from, e.g. another linux-based client? At this point I don't have any
data to draw conclusions from. Is the network encrypted? Can you try
seeing if open network also yields the same behaviour?

Logs/traces from ath10k client itself would be also helpful. You can
read more about getting these here:
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/ath10k/debug#tracing


> Running "cat /var/log/syslog | grep ath10k" after installation, I got 3
> errors because of missing firmware:
> /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw2.1/board-pci-168c:003e:105b:e08e.bin
> /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw2.1/firmware-5.bin
> lib/firmware/ath10k/cal-pci-0000:03:00.0.bin
>
> The first two messages disappeared after running
> sudo cp board.bin  board-pci-168c:003e:105b:e08e.bin
> sudo cp firmware-4.bin firmware-5.bin
> in the /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw2.1-directory. I could even delete
> board.bin and firmware-4.bin without loosing Wifi connectivity. At the
> moment these files are still there, but seem to be useless. Nevertheless
> "modinfo ath10k_pci" shows that only board.bin and firmware-4.bin from
> the hw2.1-directory are used. Very strange! I use the firmware extracted
> from my Windows installation using firmware provided by Acer's support
> page.

There's a slight bug in firmware file advertisement in ath10k_pci
hence modinfo tells you firmware-4.bin is the latest support for
qca6174 while firmware-5.bin for qca988x. This is incorrect - both
chips support firmware-5.bin in the ath10k git master branch. ath10k
tries to load newer firmware binaries first and falls back to older.
Nothing to worry about now though.


Michał