Hi, I just had a problem and managed to solve it by putting together information found in several threads on the forum, mainly
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ac58u-no-wireless-option-in-network-after-installing-18-06-1/19378
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ath10k-and-qca4019-bin-files/11341
Now, I have an idea for an improvement and I'd like to know if this would work.
After installing OpenWrt 19.07.5 on an Asus RT-AC58U router (it uses an IPQ4018 SoC), WiFi was not working. It has two radios using the ath10k driver and it turns out that it needs some calibration data, stored in a dedicated flash partition. In my case, that partition was damaged somehow, but I could recover it because the router has a 2nd identical paritition, which was still good.
Now, as I understand it, at some point during the start-up process this happens:
- the script /etc/hotplug.d/firmware/11-ath10k-caldata is run and copies the flash calibration data into /lib/firmware/ath10k/pre-cal-ahb-a000000.wifi.bin by running
ath10kcal_ubi_extract "Factory" 4096 12064
(and something similar for the 2nd radio) - the actual copying is done with
dd if=/dev/$ubi of=/lib/firmware/$FIRMWARE bs=1 skip=$offset count=$count 2>/dev/null || \
ath10kcal_die "failed to extract from $ubi"
- later on, the ath10k driver loads the /lib/firmware/ath10k/pre-cal-ahb-a000000.wifi.bin file
In my case, as the partition was broken, the file was created with 0 length, leading to the WiFi problem. And I could see that the dd command fails when I tried it myself.
So, 1st question: that error message of ath10kcal_die, is it logged somewhere? It would have helped a little to see it.
And 2nd: would it be possible to update the script to also try extracting the calibration data from the 2nd partition (Factory2) in case the first one fails?