On Tuesday, 21 December 2021 15:52:03 CET Kalle Valo wrote:
> I have told the firmware team numerious times that the board file should
> be backwards compatible as it creates problems for upstream. And I do
> try to keep everything in ath11k-firmware (and in linux-firmware)
> backwards compatible, but if they are not please do let me know.

Please check the first message to find such a problem. Ok, it was not about 
board files being really backward compatible - it actually is about the 
firmware not being backward compatible and not working with the board-2.bin/
BDFs in the same repository.

So if I get
https://github.com/kvalo/ath11k-firmware/commit/ae4f4f64ed14097dc24a8d686fa60e932cba4868/QCN9074/hw1.0/testing/2.4.0.1.r1/WLAN.HK.2.4.0.1.r1-00019-QCAHKSWPL_SILICONZ-1/board-2.bin
(extract board_id 162 as board.bin - because nobody seems to initialize the 
board_id in the OTP)

and use it with

https://github.com/kvalo/ath11k-firmware/tree/master/QCN9074/hw1.0/2.5.0.1/WLAN.HK.2.5.0.1-01100-QCAHKSWPL_SILICONZ-1

then it causes the initialization error described in the first mail. And the 
firmware used here is the only non-testing firmware available for QCN9074. And 
the board-2.bin is the only available one from your repository for QCN9074.

> For other repos I cannot do much, if any.

The described problem was NOT that files from other repositories were mixed. 
Actually, the solution was to mix the firmware with the BDF from a different 
repository.

And I didn't only see this with BDFs from your repository but also from non-
upstreamed BDFs from manufacturers which embedded a pine "card" on the PCB of 
their AP.

I was able to fix the problem for the non-upstream BDFs for this AP by 
rearranging the BDF sections to match the new layout. I didn't try this with 
the BDFs in your repository because also the IDs seemed to have changed (but I 
didn't analyze it further). Simply using the BDFs from a different repository 
was easier.

Kind regards,
	Sven