Re: question regarding qca2066 and qca206x (Steam Deck OLED/Galileo) on upstream kernels

[Kalle Valo <kvalo@kernel.org>]

Matthew Schwartz <njtransit215@gmail.com> writes:

>> Is the mismatch between file/directory structure for QCA2066 and the
>> upstream QCA206X I had to add to the upstream ath11k firmware going to
>> be an issue? Also, QCA206X seems to be missing Notice.txt. Will this
>> cause any issues?
>>
>
> Sorry there is a slight typo here. To clarify: Is the mismatch between
> file/directory structure for upstream QCA2066 and the Valve QCA206X an
> issue. I described the wrong folder as the upstream folder in my
> original reply.

So from what I have seen so far the situation seems to be this:

Steam has some ath11k hack patches to add QCA2066 support to an older
Linux kernel and they also have a separate firmware release. I do not
know where they got them from.

In Linux upstream ("kernel.org") we added initial QCA2066 support for
ath11k in Linux v6.9. We also provided the firmware[1] which will be
also submitted to linux-firmware.git in the near future.

The ath11k upstream version uses different directory structure as the
hack patches, which is not uncommon. Basically using hack patches is at
your own risk and no compatibility is guarenteed, of course. But once
the support is in official Linux kernel we take backwards compatibility
very seriously.

I want to also mention that even if Steam's ath11k firmware version
might work, I still recommend to use the firmware from our repo[1]. I do
not know what changes Steam's firmware version has and it possible might
be incompatible with kernel.org driver. In this mailing list we only
support firmware releases from [1].

[1] https://git.codelinaro.org/clo/ath-firmware/ath11k-firmware/-/tree/main/QCA2066/hw2.1?ref_type=heads

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