On 5/15/2018 9:56 PM, Kalle Valo wrote:
Jay Foster <jayf0s...@roadrunner.com> writes:
I too have been, off and on, looking for an ath10k driver solution for
a SparkLAN WUBQ-159ACN USB Wi-Fi adapter, so I have been keeping an
eye on this mailing list. I just tried the latest
ath10k-pending-sdio-usb branch (ath10k-pending-sdio-usb-201804210910
tag), since I could see that support for the SparkLAN USB 0CF3:9378
device was just added. The driver refers to this as the SparkLAN
WPEQ-160ACN device, but it has the same USB vendor/product ID as my
WUBQ-159ACN. They both use the QCA9377 chip.
I got a driver to build with the 4.9 kernel and when it boots, it
recognizes my Wi-Fi adapter. Now, I am trying to sort out what to do
about firmware. I downloaded the board-2.bin, board.bin,
firmware-5.bin files from
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0.
I used the ath10k-fwencoder application from the qca-swiss-army-knife
tools to also build a firmware file, but I am not clear on what files
I should be using. SparkLAN provided, with the qcacld-2.0 wlan
driver, the following files:
athsetup.bin, athwlan.bin, cfg.dat, fakeboar.bin, otp.bin, and
qcom_cfg.ini. I used the command:
qca-swiss-army-knife/tools/scripts/ath10k/ath10k-fwencoder --create
--otp ../../../otp.bin --firmware ../../../athwlan.bin
--set-wmi-op-version=tlv --set-htt-op-version=tlv --set-fw-api=6
--features=ignore-otp-result
to create my firmware-usb-6.bin and used the fakeboar.bin for my
board-usb.bin files. However, when the driver loads, it is looking
for a file called ath10k/cal-usb-1-1.2.bin. Where do I get that
file?
You can ignore that warning. cal-*.bin are optional files containing the
calibration data, in case you don't have the calibration data in OTP.
But my guess is that in your device you have the calibration data in OTP
so you don't need cal-*.bin.
Hopefully in 4.18 that warning will be away and users won't get confused
anymore.
I tried using the athsetup.bin file for this, but I do not
think that works. The driver reports:
/lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0# usb 1-1.2: qca9377 hw1.1 SparkLAN
WPEQ-160ACN target 0x05020001 chip_id 0x00000000 sub 0000:0000
usb 1-1.2: kconfig debug 1 debugfs 0 tracing 0 dfs 0 testmode 1
usb 1-1.2: firmware ver api 6 features ignore-otp crc32 e8985f67
usb 1-1.2: found invalid board magic
usb 1-1.2: board_file api 1 bmi_id N/A crc32 58a139e9
usb 1-1.2: invalid hw_params.n_cipher_suites 0
What does invalid board magic mean?
This log means that ath10k first tried to load board-2.bin but it was
corrupted for some reason. Then it found and used board.bin instead.
It seems odd that the board-2.bin file I downloaded from
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0
is somehow corrupted. Does the message mean that the board-2.bin file
itself is bad or that it is not appropriate/useful for my particular
Wi-Fi device?
When you say that the driver then used board.bin instead, I think in my
case this is board-usb.bin (the same as my fakeboar.bin file from
SparkLAN), since my device is a USB device. I am just trying to be
clear on my understanding.
The Wi-Fi USB adapter may be installed in any number of different USB
locations, so why is the USB location (1-1.2) part of one of the
filenames?
Because there needs to be some way to identify multiple devices on the
same host. But cal-*.bin is mainly meant for AP devices where the
devices have a fixed slot in the PCI bus and the calibration data is
stored in host's filesystem (check openwrt to see how it's used).
I did manage to get a successful Wi-Fi STA mode connection with this
driver. One issue that I don't understand is when the driver attempts
to load a FW file that is not present, it fails with error -2 and then
reports, "Falling back to user helper". However, this 'user helper'
does not exist/work either, but the driver waits quite a while waiting
for it (about half a minute or so). This causes a delay loading the
driver (about half a minute for each missing file). So, even though the
cal files are optional, if they are not there, it significantly delays
loading of the driver. I need to eliminate this delay. For now, I
patched the driver to not attempt to load the pre-cal-usb-<bus>.bin or
the cal-usb-<bus>.bin files (that do not exist for my adapter), but
there must be a better way to avoid this delay.
Thanks very much for your help.
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