ath10k / WCN3990: firmware-5.bin and wlanmdsp.mbn being out of sync

[Kalle Valo]

Hi Dmitry,

Dmitry Baryshkov <dmitry.baryshkov at linaro.org> writes:

> I wanted to ask your opinion regarding one of the issues we stumbled
> upon on the Qualcomm RB1 and RB2 platforms. These platforms use ath10k
> snoc (WCN3990) WiFi "card". We noticed the following messages being
> spawned on the console, which I traced it to the
> ATH10K_FW_FEATURE_SINGLE_CHAN_INFO_PER_CHANNEL feature:
>
> ath10k_snoc c800000.wifi: chan info: invalid frequency 0 (idx 41 out of bounds)
>
> As a reminder, on this platform the wlan firmware and firmware-N.bin
> files come separately.
> The wlanmdsp.mbn is downloaded by the onboard modem DSP via the
> tqftpserv request (which is served from the board-specific folder
> qcom/qcm2210). The firmware-N.bin file is loaded by the WiFi driver
> itself from the generic folder, ath10k/WCN3990/hw1.0. Current
> firmware-5.bin file was provided with the sdm845's wlanmdsp.mbn, which
> is older than qcm2210/qrb4210's wlanmdsp.mbn.
>
> I'm looking for suggestions on how to make ath10k driver load
> firmware-N.bin file which corresponds to the board-specific
> wlanmdsp.mbn.

We have had similar discussions in the past but it didn't go very far.
It would be so nice if you could finally fix this :) At one point we
even had a discussion that we might need something similar for ath11k
but it didn't go anywhere.

> In particular I'd like to hear your opinion on the following proposal:
>
> Add the  optional property to the board DT, that specifies:
> firmware-name = "path/to/wlanmdsp.mbn".  The property, if present,
> will be used as an override for the firmware directory. So, while the
> ath10k driver will not load wlanmdsp.mbn on its own, it will still
> look for the firmware-N files in the specified directory.

Back in the day I was thinking something like below, please let me know
what you think.

So the normal firmware path for WCN3990 is:

ath10k/WCN3990/hw1.0/

My idea was that if we could extend it for different "platforms" (not
sure what's the proper term for this) by having platform specific
directories:

ath10k/WCN3990/hw1.0-platform/

(Replace "platform" with a unique name for the platform, for example
"acme-kv7" for a product from Acme with model name kv7.)

Then DT could inform ath10k about this "platform" string and ath10k
would then download boath firmware-N.bin and board-2.bin from the
platform specific directory.

And even cleaner if we could have the *.mbn firmware files in the same
directory, even if ath10k doesn't access them directly.

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