ath10k fail to load firmware

[Michal Kazior]

On 19 July 2016 at 09:09, Stanislaw Gruszka <sgruszka at redhat.com> wrote:
> Perry from Dell has ath10k device, which do not work with current
> linux-firmware. It's on RHEL kernel, however wirelss stack and drivers
> are from 4.7-rc1 (I did not update to 4.7 final yet, since I do not see
> ath10k fix, which could possibly help here). Partial dmesg is in
> the attachment.

hw.3 qca6174 chips tend to require very specific board data for proper
calibration.

  [ 3838.601884] ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: failed to fetch board data
for bus=pci,vendor=168c,device=003e,subsystem-vendor=1028,subsystem-device=0310
from ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board-2.bin
  [ 3838.601920] ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: board_file api 1 bmi_id N/A
crc32 ed5f849a

Your board-2.bin doesn't contain the matching board data and the
driver then falls back to the older board API1 which is pretty much
doomed to fail on qca6174 hw.3.

@Kalle: Perhaps ath10k needs to fail early with an adequate message
for qca6174 hw.3 if board API2 lookup fails (e.g. hw_params flag
because this seems to be quite closely coupled with hardware itself).

@Stanislaw: You either need to grab a more recent board-2.bin
(https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware/tree/master/QCA6174/hw3.0),
ask Kalle & wait, or cook up your own (if you really need it working
*now*) by getting Windows driver and dissecting it (the .inf file
contains enough information for you to map board data also referred to
as eeprom-something in the Windows blob).


Michał