[elrepo] ath10k

[Nicolas Thierry-Mieg]

Hi,

I bought a new laptop for my son, an Acer Aspire E5-575G-55DE, and 
installed Centos 7 on it.
The wireless is:
$ lspci -nn | grep Network
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros Device [168c:0042] 
(rev 31)

The driver for this is ath10k, so I tried installing kmod-ath10k and 
ath10k-firmware from elrepo, but no joy: both of these are too old.

I then installed kernel-lt-4.4.21-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64.rpm .

I also copied the 4 files from [1] into 
/lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/ (creating this subdir), and copying 
firmware-5.bin_WLAN.TF.1.0-00267-1 as firmware-5.bin :
$ pwd
/lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0
$ ll
total 1660
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 427668 Sep 20 12:24 board-2.bin
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root   8124 Sep 20 12:24 board.bin
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 605908 Sep 20 12:24 firmware-5.bin
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 605908 Sep 20 12:24 
firmware-5.bin_WLAN.TF.1.0-00267-1
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  46142 Sep 20 12:24 notice.txt_WLAN.TF.1.0-00267-1
$

I also had to yum install NetworkManager-wifi, I guess it hadn't been 
installed by C7 because it could not detect any wireless interfaces.

Now, booting into kernel-lt 4.4.21-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64 , the wifi works!

I am posting this to help others who may have similar hardware, but also 
as a question / request: could kmod-ath10k and ath10k-firmware from 
elrepo be updated in order to support these newer wifi chips?

Thanks!
Regards,
Nicolas


[1] https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware/tree/master/QCA9377/hw1.0