[elrepo] ath10k

[Phil Perry]

On 20/09/16 14:29, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:
> 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

Hi Nicolas,

Many thanks for the feedback.

The wireless stack in RHEL7.2 is backported from kernel-4.1. As such we 
are pretty much bound to backporting wireless drivers to match the 
wireless stack, so the current kmod-ath10k driver is backported from 
kernel-4.1.x.

If this driver doesn't support your device, we could look at backporting 
support for that device to the 4.1.x tree driver.

Firmwares can be tricky as they can be version specific, and thus 
dependant on the driver version. If we know what files are needed then 
we aim to package them.

But at this point it all may be a little academic as I note RHEL7.3 will 
contain the ath10k driver backported from kernel-4.7 so we will be 
deprecating our kmod-ath10k package in favour of the distro kernel driver:

[phil at Quad RHEL7.3beta]$ rpm -qlp kernel-3.10.0-493.el7.x86_64.rpm | 
grep ath10
/lib/modules/3.10.0-493.el7.x86_64/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath10k
/lib/modules/3.10.0-493.el7.x86_64/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath10k/ath10k_core.ko
/lib/modules/3.10.0-493.el7.x86_64/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath10k/ath10k_pci.ko

So at this point I'd say if you can carry on using kernel-lt until 7.3 
is released, your device should then be natively supported.

Regards,

Phil