ath10k: is there hw3.0 firmware for qca6164 (one spatial stream)

[Michal Kazior]

On 25 August 2016 at 13:56, Xuebing Wang <xbing6 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Michal,
>
> First of all, thank you very much for your help.
>
> 1) As you are the author of adding qca6164 (one spatial stream) to ath10k,
> are you aware if there is qca6164 chip with hw3.x which requires hw3.x
> firmware?

I don't recall seeing hw3 qca6164. That doesn't mean there isn't one though.


> 1.1) What qca6164 wlan card did you use while you authored the support of
> qca6164?

I didn't really have one. I worked with qca6164 owners and they did
the verification. Can't remember what exact cards they had. My memory
tells me some Lenovo Yoga tablet had one.


> 2) From the source code in core.c, there is only hw2.1 (.id =
> QCA6174_HW_2_1_VERSION) for qca6164.
> ---
> static const struct ath10k_hw_params ath10k_hw_params_list[] = {
>     {
>         .id = QCA6174_HW_2_1_VERSION,
>         .dev_id = QCA6164_2_1_DEVICE_ID,
>         .name = "qca6164 hw2.1",
> ....
>     };
> ---

Yep. I haven't seen hw3 for qca6164 and on one has reported problems
with one yet.


> 3) I checked Kalle's ath10k-firmware repository at github, there is no such
> QCA6164/ folder (one spatial stream). Does 6164 use the same firmware as
> 6174?

Yes, it uses the same firmware as qca6174. At one point there was an
idea to start calling the chip qca61x4.


> 4) As in your commit message as below, would you please advise where can I
> get this special board.bin file?
> ---
>     The QCA6164 needs a dedicated board.bin file which
>     is different than the one used for QCA6174. If the
>     board.bin is wrong the device will crash early
>     while trying to boot firmware. The register dump
>     will look like this:
> ---

This comment was made before board API2 was introduced. Before that
there was only a single board blob in board.bin per hw chip, hence the
warning.

Now there's board-2.bin which contains a set of board blobs per
vendor/product/subsys vendor/product ids and the driver can pick up
the correct one. The latest one[1] seems to have some qca6164 board
blobs. If you end up getting one that doesn't work you can report it.
It shouldn't be terribly hard to get it fixed.


[1]: https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware/blob/master/QCA6174/hw2.1/board-2.bin


Michał