ath10k installation

I've had a number of issues with my Acer Aspire V17 Nitro Black Edition and Ubuntu 15.10, but I managed to solve the Wi-Fi. I had to do a combination of things the answers from above, namely:

1. Copy the QCA6174 directory from https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware into /lib/firmware/ath10k/. I already had an older version of QCA6174 in that directory, so I renamed the old folder to QCA6174.orig.
2. Download the file from Comment 2 here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1294263#c2 and save it as /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board.bin (backing up the old board.bin as board.bin.orig)
3. Reboot.

I'm posting this comment from my new internet connection over Wi-Fi. So far it seems to be working fine.

Ubuntu 16.04 users with internet access (e.g. ethernet) should just have to install updates and reboot:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo reboot

For those without internet, download the firmware drivers from here. Choose the latest version for your architecture. For example, version 1.157.5 (newest as of 29/11/16) for amd64 is here.

Once you have the .deb package, install as usual. For our example, it is:

sudo dpkg -i linux-firmware_1.157.5_all.deb

Reboot, and now it should be working.

---

It might be easier to install backports than trying to use github

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-generic
wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/backports/2015/03/13/backports-20150313.tar.xz
tar xvfJ backports-20150313.tar.xz
cd backports-20150313
make defconfig-ath10k
make
sudo make install

Then reboot when it is finished. Your wifi is fairly new to Linux so it might not be fully functional even with this

I had similar problem with my new laptop Asus Aspire V3-371-51 after installing the new Ubuntu (15.10) which has 4.2 kernel (so no backport is needed).

$ uname -r
4.2.0-16-generic

lspci showed the following data:

$ lspci
02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 20)
$ lspci -n
02:00.0 0280: 168c:003e (rev 20)

Checking dmesg, I realized that in my case the firmware is missing.

[    2.360584] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: Direct firmware load for ath10k/cal-pci-0000:02:00.0.bin failed with error -2
[    2.362523] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: Direct firmware load for ath10k/QCA6174/hw2.1/board-pci-168c:003e:11ad:0804.bin failed with error -2
[    2.362527] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: failed to load spec board file, falling back to generic: -2
[    2.362536] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: Direct firmware load for ath10k/QCA6174/hw2.1/board.bin failed with error -2
[    2.362538] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: failed to fetch generic board data: -2
[    2.362540] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: failed to fetch board file: -2
[    2.362541] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: could not fetch firmware files (-2)
[    2.362543] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: could not probe fw (-2)

Copying an appropriate firmware from https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware/archive/master.zip to /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw2.1 did the trick - after reboot.

BTW I had to create the that path, because only QCA988X subdirectory was in /lib/firmware/ath10k before.