ath12k: recommended regulatory country source for embedded AP products?

ath12k: recommended regulatory country source for embedded AP products?

[Vitor Soares]

Hello,

I'm integrationg the Silex SX-PCEBE module (Qualcomm WCN7850, ath12k) on the
ARM-based Toradex Aquila SoM family, using a recent mainline kernel (7.2-rc).

Hardware/firmware: wcn7850 hw2.0 (PCI),
WLAN.HMT.1.1.c7-00108-QCAHMTSWPL_V1.0_V2.0_SILICONZ_UPSTREAM-3
(fw_version 0x1103006c).

I'm trying to understand the intended way to set the regulatory country for
ath12k on embedded products where the country is configured by the integrator of
our SoM or at deployment time by the end user.

My current understanding is that ath12k registers the wiphy as self-managed, but
userspace regulatory hints, e.g. "iw reg", are ignored in ath12k_reg_notifier()
unless CONFIG_ATH_REG_DYNAMIC_USER_REG_HINTS=y, which in turn depends on
CONFIG_CFG80211_CERTIFICATION_ONUS.

The SMBIOS coounty-code path, looks intended for fixed regional SKUs, However,
it is not available on our ARM platform.

So, I have 2 related questions:

1 - Is the expected ath12k model for this type of product to enable 
ATH_REG_DYNAMIC_USER_REG_HINTS and use userspace regulatory hints before
starting hostapd, with the regulatory responsibility on the product/integrator?


Or is there another mechanism you would recomment for this use case?

2 - Since ath12k is a self-managed regulatory device and the firmware owns and
enforces the regulatory database, is the CFG80211_CERTIFICATION_ONUS gate
intended to apply to this case as well?

In other words, should a userspace-selected country for a self-managed ath12k
device be treated the same as dynamic user regulatory hints for non-self-managed
devices, or is this dependency inherited from the common ath regulatory model?

Without a country, the ath12k falls back to world "00", where 5 GHz AP operation
is blocked by NO_IR.

Thanks,
Vitor Soares