QCA9377 loads wrong firmware after update

Hardware
1

We have a few machines with a Qualcomm QCA9377 chipset that have been working as access points on blue0 via hostapd. However, I updated two machines to Core 142 last night, and now neither has a blue0 interface, and this is what I see in the bootlog:

[    6.905147] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: Direct firmware load for ath10k/pre-cal-pci-0000:02:00.0.bin failed with error -2
[    6.905373] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: Direct firmware load for ath10k/cal-pci-0000:02:00.0.bin failed with error -2
[    6.925848] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: qca9377 hw1.1 target 0x05020001 chip_id 0x003821ff sub 17aa:0901
[    6.925968] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: kconfig debug 1 debugfs 0 tracing 0 dfs 1 testmode 1
[    6.939323] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: firmware ver WLAN.TF.2.1-00021-QCARMSWP-1 api 6 features wowlan,ignore-otp crc32 42e41877

The files seem to be there in the firmware directory:

[root@boxen ath10k]# ls -lh /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/
total 1.9M
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 298K Jun 29  2018 board-2.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.0K Jun 29  2018 board.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 765K Aug 30  2018 firmware-5.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 734K Dec 14 03:28 firmware-6.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  46K Aug 30  2018 notice_ath10k_firmware-5.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  53K Dec 14 03:28 notice_ath10k_firmware-6.txt

Any thoughts?

Tom

2

A little digging seems to indicate that the firmware error messages are a red herring. Which still leaves me wondering why my routers think that they don’t have a blue interface.

Is this a case of where I need to go into setup and remove the card assignments from all interfaces and then reassign them? If so, that’s going to be a PITA, as I can’t do it remotely, seeing as how IPFire brings down the non-local network when going into the part of the setup program.

3

Removing all interfaces from setup and then selecting them again does not change anything. I did, however, find this thread on a Gentoo forum that pointed me in the right direction. It seems like having firmware6.bin in the /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/ directory causes this failure. Removing that file and “notice_ath10k_firmware-6.txt” for good measure, then rebooting solved the issue.

It seems odd to me that this should be an issue, but apparently it is.