QCA4019: calibration files and board files

[Waldemar Rymarkiewicz]

On 9 March 2017 at 14:11, Christian Lamparter <chunkeey at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, March 9, 2017 1:46:00 PM CET Sven Eckelmann wrote:
>> On Donnerstag, 9. März 2017 11:51:13 CET Valo, Kalle wrote:
>> [...]
>> > I haven't followed the discussion very closely, so I might be way off,
>> > but for laptop SMBIOS implementations Waldemar added a variant field to
>> > board-2.bin so that we can have multiple images for the same subsystem
>> > id. Could it help here also?
>> >
>> > https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/kvalo/ath.git/commit/
>> > ?h=ath-next&id=1657b8f84ed9fc1d2a100671f1d42d6286f20073
>>
>> Thanks for the pointer.
> I've added Waldemar.


If bmi ids are valid you will not use SMBIOS variant at all. See
ath10k_core_create_board_name().

> From what I can tell, adding something like a variant to the bmi-id would
> help. I looked at the patch note and it strikes me a bit odd that the
> used variant was a non-descriptive "DE_1AB" string? Isn't this bit arbitrary?

Well, DE here stands for customer ID, but I haven't seen any  spec how
this is defined..

Adding Aeolus who perhaps can help to explain.

> What is encoded in these variant strings? Are these variants "unique"?

I guess so, QCA is assigning customers ID.

> Who will distribute these special board-2.bin that contain all the
> different variants?

hmmm.. I would expect QCA.

>
> Also the patch says that if the variant isn't found, it will fall back to
> the default.

Yes, because if it happens that user uses board with smbios variant
set but have no entry for this variant in board-2.bin (old
board-2.bin) it will fail to boot. We got reports on that, so we
decided to fallback to default  bdf. Otherwise already shipped devices
working so far after kernel upgrade will stop to work.

 In case of the Asus RT-AC58U, this will not really work.
> From what I can tell, ASUS added a PA chip and 5 dBi Antennas. They had to
> redo the calibration and ended up with different values for the PA, AGC,
> Edges, Slobes, the lot... However, they kept the the project/customer id.
> So the board-2.bin found on codeaurora and in the ath10k-repository will
> not work.

If I understand properly, Asus uses modified board-2.bin  so default
found on codeaurora and ath10k-repo will not work. Right? Use the
proper one?


/Waldek