Wireless

Some variants of the ConnectCore 6 system-on-module assemble a Qualcomm-Atheros chip capable of 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz connections using 802.11 a/b/g/n. This wireless chip is connected to uSDHC1 controller.

Features

IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n support
Software Access Point (SoftAP) support
Security (Open, WEP, WPA/WPA2 PSK, WPA/WPA2 Enterprise)
Power save
Bluetooth coexistence
Wi-Fi Direct (P2P)
Concurrent mode (AP-STA and STA-P2P)

The Atheros wireless chip does not support wireless adhoc mode.

Kernel configuration

You can manage the wireless driver support through the kernel configuration option:

Atheros ath6kl SDIO support (CONFIG_ATH6KL_SDIO)

This option is enabled as built-in on the default ConnectCore 6 SBC kernel configuration file.

Platform driver mapping

The Atheros ATH6KL wireless driver is located at drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath6kl/.

Device tree bindings and customization

Device tree bindings for the Atheros wireless driver are documented at Documentation/devicetree/bindings/digi,ath6kl,wireless.txt.

Definition of the wireless device

ConnectCore 6 system-on-module device tree

wireless {
        compatible = "atheros,ath6kl";
        ath6kl-p2p-enable;
        ath6kl-softmac-enable;
        digi,pwrdown-gpios = <&gpio_extender 3 0>;
        /* U-Boot will fill in the MAC address here */
};

This node is also used as a placeholder for containing Digi's wireless MAC address.

MAC address

The MAC address of the wireless interface is programmed during manufacturing on the ConnectCore 6 eMMC using U-Boot environment variable wlanaddr. It is also printed on the module label.

Before booting the operating system, U-Boot writes the MAC address stored in environment variable wlanaddr into the device tree wireless node under property mac-address.

If the boolean property ath6kl-softmac-enable is defined in the device tree, the wireless device will use Digi's MAC address. If not, it will use Atheros' MAC embedded in the chip.

See Environment variables.

Known issues

When using the softAP mode on Band A, channels used for Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) are not supported.
The firmware does not support the following configuration modes:
- Concurrent modes involving P2P mode, such as P2P + softAP or P2P + STA
- The Bluetooth + softAP + STA concurrent mode