this post is a courtesy for pkgadd on irc (@slh?)
Note this is mostly a learning exercise for myself and I'm well aware that I'm blindly trying a patch with incomplete understanding of the workings of openwrt, linux, etc. Constructive comments are still welcome if it helps the community.
The patch applied to ath10k-ct-2018-09-29-b9989fbd (4.16 kernel sources only) compiles on OpenWrt SNAPSHOT, r8623+2-7e88753ace with out errors. On the r7500v2 that I'm testing it with, I've observed no runtime errors/issues yet.
Unfortunately, the symptoms I'd like to alleviate (wireless android/iphone clients de-authenticating every GTK event) continue to occur. I'm back to setting "option wpa_group_rekey '86400'". There may be some benefit for linux/windows/osx wireless clients (i.e. devices that don't go to sleep like phones or tablets) so I will continue to test. Note, before trying this patch (and likely a separate unrelated issue) I'd get about 24 hours before wireless pretty much became unusable for me due to device deauth events at 30 minute intervals. The 30 min interval does not correlate with any setting in /etc/config/wireless.
I am not testing WDS connected AP's nor am I testing on a r7800 so I can't comment if this patch will help with the gtk deauth events that this patch was supposed to fix. pkgadd apparently tried this patch on the stock ath10k driver without success.
If anyone is interested, my ath10k-ct patch is here which is on branch nmrh-r7500v2-4add forked from openwrt git (and should be current as of today).