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Bacterius

Member

Registered: 2017-01-07

Posts: 1

ath10k wireless driver unusable on Acer F5-573G laptop

Hi everyone!

I have an Acer F5-573G-751K laptop which has the following wireless interface:

03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 31)
        Subsystem: Lite-On Communications Inc Device 08a6
        Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci
        Kernel modules: ath10k_pci

The kernel driver is loaded, however there is an issue with the firmware upon boot in dmesg:

[    3.054706] ath10k_pci 0000:03:00.0: Direct firmware load for ath10k/pre-cal-pci-0000:03:00.0.bin failed with error -2
[    3.054734] ath10k_pci 0000:03:00.0: Direct firmware load for ath10k/cal-pci-0000:03:00.0.bin failed with error -2
[    3.057475] ath10k_pci 0000:03:00.0: qca9377 hw1.1 target 0x05020001 chip_id 0x003821ff sub 11ad:08a6
[    3.057479] ath10k_pci 0000:03:00.0: kconfig debug 0 debugfs 1 tracing 0 dfs 0 testmode 0
[    3.058824] ath10k_pci 0000:03:00.0: firmware ver WLAN.TF.1.0-00267-1 api 5 features ignore-otp crc32 79cea2c7
[    3.122798] ath10k_pci 0000:03:00.0: board_file api 2 bmi_id N/A crc32 93da0176

What happens is I can scan networks with the device, can connect to Wifi networks, and can even use the wireless on the laptop for a bit... but then randomly (or, oddly enough, when moving my laptop) the entire Wifi network (in the entire house) goes down immediately, until the network card is shut down. I am hypothesizing here that when this happens the network card goes into a bad state and begins flooding RF interference, jamming the network, but I lack the equipment to verify that.

I have looked around and apparently I have the correct firmware as the files in /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0 match the ones I found recommended online, however they are obviously not loading properly. I have also set the `skip_otp=Y` option on the a10k_core module as suggested by a few people but with no improvements.

I am at a loss here; can I somehow get more information on what exactly is failing during the load? What is error -2 (is it an errno, in which case it'd be ENOENT)? Is this error even relevant to the issues encountered with my network card? I don't understand because I have read about people having similar issues with other models of the same card using the same module, and everything was supposedly "fixed" when the new firmware was included in Linux 4.4...

Any thoughts, or anyone had the same issue? I would like to hear from you.

Kind thanks

Last edited by Bacterius (2017-01-07 10:23:44)

jeremy31

Member

Registered: 2015-11-01

Posts: 149

Re: ath10k wireless driver unusable on Acer F5-573G laptop

The -2 error means not found which is normal because those files do not exist(yet).  You might want to check your system and router logs to see if there is something in them that explains why the network goes down