ATH10K Driver for QCA9888 WLE650V5-18A

Hi,

I bought a compex WLE650V5-18A hoping the ath10k drivers would work but unfortunately I can’t find a working board / firmware-x.bin combination. Does anyone here know if it’s supported by any of the existing Ath10 firmware?

Cheers!

Hi, about maybe month ago I have written something about this in czech language here:


According to all Compex materials this card should works with a ath10k driver (even on their Facebook page they mentioned it)

http://us5.campaign-archive1.com/?u=1116d8b46f6d03245b1afb853&id=b365c54f6f

The main problem is the “MiniPCI Express 2.0 interface” I don’t know what that is or if it’s compatible with those ports on Omnia. And btw. this card looks even more awesome!
http://www.compex.com.sg/product/wle1216v5-20

The problem is that all these older cards even those which are in Omnia has “MiniPCI-e Pin v1.1” so I don’t know if the v2.0 is OK, I can’t find anything about that on the Internet - all these expensive routers like Linksys or Netgear etc. are just one board and you can’t change anything on them like in Omnia so there’s not so much info. In the product details Compex originally mentioned that it will be v1.1 and about month ago they have changed it to v2.0. So that’s all I know.

Hi,

Thanks for all the info @qxstyles, much appreciated. I had no idea Compex had changed the interface from MiniPCI Express 1.x to 2.0… I hope that doesn’t mean it won’t ever work…

It does show up as a device from lspci:

03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros Device 0056

and is recognised by the ath10k driver, but the firmware crashes and the interface never comes up. I also asked on the Compex forum - they said it works with their board (?!) and the new Qualcom QCA 10.4 drivers, but I can’t find them so far.

Will keep everyone posted - if anyone knows a working config or link that would be great!

Cheers!

Looks like they will release the driver after some time. I hope it’ll be soon. This is it, isn’t it? http://forum.compex.com.sg/125-wle650v5-18-openwrt. About the interface … It should be OK according to this http://www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-38x/, but I’m not 100% sure.

Anyway, I think it’ll be OK but it needs some time, it’s very soon for this because the preorder for these cards started circa 1 month ago and as I have written there is not too much routers or any kind of boards/devices which have slots for miniPCI-E cards so every manufacturer has it’s own board platform and don’t expect that someone will put it in some device like Turris Omnia - maybe they even don’t know about Omnia - honestly, there’s circa 7 - 10 thousand users of Omnia - it’s very small number for some big company.

802.11ac-Wave2 is still new technology and this card is the first card that can be used in devices like Omnia. So that’s probably the reason why there is no drivers for these cards. After launching of similar cards, there will be no problem in my opinion.

Quick update - with the latest wireless board and firmware this card is now working. Haven’t tested anything outside of the 20/40 but luci now offers both 80/160 ranges and the radio comes up. The card does get pretty warm in the Omnia case though - if you are going this route, consider adding a small case fan.

Cheers.

Great news. Can you provide more details about fan? How to acquire one for omnia, and so on?

I am looking forward for more info that you acquire as time moves forward.

Hi,

I added a small gpu cooling fan (12v) to the heat sink on top of the card, then connected it to the 1st two pins of the internal hdd connector.

With this configuration, system usage around 10% avg with the wifi up, sensors reports a fairly stable 82 degrees - which seems ok considering the WLE650 runs pretty hot on its own and I also have a warm ssd.

Cheers!

1 Like

@TheChaZ: Any news on that - did you do throughput-meassurements? Does DFS work as advertised (are you able to choose DFS-channels)? Does it offer stable connections?

Hi

Sorry not been around much & annoyingly I don’t use the wifi on the Omnia much either. I haven’t tried anything your interested in but I can say that the card is only stable / usable for me on ch36. I also don’t have an ac client to test against so I don’t know how it really performs. If you’d like some specify info, send me some instructions and I’ll try it out for you?

Hi,

thanks for your reply and offer to help :slight_smile:
Unfortunatelly without an ac-client throughput-measurement won’t work :wink:
One important thing of this card would have been the advertised working DFS-channels. It should be possible to choose one of the DFS-channels (according to the country you’re living in) 100-140.
Instructions on how to test could be found at https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/uci/wireless#dfsradar_detection

Only channel 36 working for you could mean your other hardware is not capable of reading channels higher than 36 (or it might be because of isues with the driver). I as an example cannot use any channel higher than 48, otherwise my SmartTV won’t see the SID.

Hi Again,

Ok, so I spoke out of turn - the card does in fact work well on all channels (DFS included for the CZ region at least). I’m not sure if it’s a bug or an issue with luci - when I set anything other than 36 there it fails, when I use Foris it’s fine?!

Foris doesn’t advertise the 160 channel mode, but I guess it’s not that common yet, or needs some enhancement(s)… as of OS version 7.3.1 at least.

Here’s a dump of the iw info:

Wiphy phy1
max # scan SSIDs: 16
max scan IEs length: 199 bytes
Retry short limit: 7
Retry long limit: 4
Coverage class: 0 (up to 0m)
Device supports AP-side u-APSD.
Available Antennas: TX 0x3 RX 0x3
Configured Antennas: TX 0x3 RX 0x3
Supported interface modes:
* managed
* AP
* AP/VLAN
* monitor
* mesh point
Band 2:
Capabilities: 0x19ef
RX LDPC
HT20/HT40
SM Power Save disabled
RX HT20 SGI
RX HT40 SGI
TX STBC
RX STBC 1-stream
Max AMSDU length: 7935 bytes
DSSS/CCK HT40
Maximum RX AMPDU length 65535 bytes (exponent: 0x003)
Minimum RX AMPDU time spacing: 8 usec (0x06)
HT TX/RX MCS rate indexes supported: 0-15
VHT Capabilities (0x339979fa):
Max MPDU length: 11454
Supported Channel Width: 160 MHz, 80+80 MHz
RX LDPC
short GI (80 MHz)
short GI (160/80+80 MHz)
TX STBC
SU Beamformer
SU Beamformee
MU Beamformer
MU Beamformee
RX antenna pattern consistency
TX antenna pattern consistency
VHT RX MCS set:
1 streams: MCS 0-9
2 streams: MCS 0-9
3 streams: not supported
4 streams: not supported
5 streams: not supported
6 streams: not supported
7 streams: not supported
8 streams: not supported
VHT RX highest supported: 0 Mbps
VHT TX MCS set:
1 streams: MCS 0-9
2 streams: MCS 0-9
3 streams: not supported
4 streams: not supported
5 streams: not supported
6 streams: not supported
7 streams: not supported
8 streams: not supported
VHT TX highest supported: 0 Mbps
Frequencies:
* 5180 MHz [36] (23.0 dBm)
* 5200 MHz [40] (23.0 dBm)
* 5220 MHz [44] (23.0 dBm)
* 5240 MHz [48] (23.0 dBm)
* 5260 MHz [52] (20.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: available (for 1201 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5280 MHz [56] (20.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: available (for 1201 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5300 MHz [60] (20.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: available (for 1201 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5320 MHz [64] (20.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: available (for 1201 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5500 MHz [100] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5520 MHz [104] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5540 MHz [108] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5560 MHz [112] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5580 MHz [116] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5600 MHz [120] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5620 MHz [124] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5640 MHz [128] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5660 MHz [132] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5680 MHz [136] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5700 MHz [140] (27.0 dBm) (radar detection)
DFS state: usable (for 8846 sec)
DFS CAC time: 60000 ms
* 5720 MHz [144] (disabled)
* 5745 MHz [149] (disabled)
* 5765 MHz [153] (disabled)
* 5785 MHz [157] (disabled)
* 5805 MHz [161] (disabled)
* 5825 MHz [165] (disabled)
valid interface combinations:
* #{ managed } <= 1, #{ AP, mesh point } <= 16,
total <= 16, #channels <= 1, STA/AP BI must match, radar detect widths: { 20 MHz (no HT), 20 MHz, 40 MHz, 80 MHz }

HT Capability overrides:
	 * MCS: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
	 * maximum A-MSDU length
	 * supported channel width
	 * short GI for 40 MHz
	 * max A-MPDU length exponent
	 * min MPDU start spacing

So far the card seems pretty stable, but runs very warm even with it’s own heat sync so if you go this route I’d add a CPU fan to your shopping list!

Cheers!

Thank you very much!
The card seems desirable.
How did you do the fan-implementation - could you share pictures (also of the cabling)?

Hi TheChaZ,

Today, I got a WLE650V5-25 card. It has a QCA9888 chip as well.

So far, it does not work.

Did you used the ath10k driver which comes preinstalled with the TurrisOS or did you download some other version of a ath10k driver?

Thanks,
Thomas

Hi Tom,

It’s been a while but it didn’t work out of the box. I ended up using the board2 from the linux wireless latest and the CT firmware from http://www.candelatech.com/ath10k.php which works.

Not sure what your card looks like, the WLE650V5-12 looks like (from lspci -v) :

03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros Device 0056
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 121
Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2M]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/8 Maskable+ 64bit-
Capabilities: [70] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [148] Virtual Channel
Capabilities: [168] Device Serial Number 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
Capabilities: [178] Latency Tolerance Reporting
Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci

The biggest problem was the board file, good luck I hope you get it going!

Cheers,
ChaZ

You can simply install the packet ath10k-firmware-qca9888 (opkg update; upkg install ath10k-firmware-qca9888). The packages also include the file board2.bin. The firmware from candela tech is also available (ath10k-firmware-qca9888-ct), but i have problems with there. With the standard firmware, i have running the wle650v5-18 without problems.

@RolandT - True, the question being asked here was about the high power version of the card (WLE650V5-25) which doesn’t seem to work out of the box according to @Tom but not sure if that was an old message or not.

The WLE650V5-18A works well now as you mention, I went through the above as I had to wait a month or so before the ath10k firmware was updated originally in Turris OS.

Cheers,
ChaZ