About the mainline linux kernel bluetooth and WiFi support for MediaTek

[alifilhan0]

I am really sorry to disturb with a bit of off topic issue. But I want to know how compatible is the mainline mediatek bluetooth driver a.k.a BTIF and btmtkuart/btmtksdio with the Banana Pi R2? is it usable at all? And what about the mainline WiFi support? The MT6625L is the RF frontend of the WiFi and bluetooth features right? Then there is an internal IP block for the BT/WiFi/ and whatnot on the board. How to get them working with mainline? Can you please point me to the right direction?

[frank-w]

Hi,
I don't know if you can use mainline btif driver.

My repo is based on mainline,so you can easily use the patches to include the wifi driver, but i guess you want to avoid this buggy wmt driver.

If i would know a way to get mt6625 working without this driver i would not use this driver.

[alifilhan0]

Actually I have a device with MT6735 and MT6625L IC, want to run a totally mainline linux kernel on it. I think the kernel will have support for almost everything except the Camera ISP, WiFi, BT, GPS and the Baseband Cellular 2/3/4G modem(since older MTK SoC basically share almost same IP blocks among them). So as you say there's no way to get MT6625 in mainline, I am thinking of using the vendor driver codes+firmware I have from BSP for these missing parts. I just want to know then how the Android driver for MT6625 was ported to linux. Any hints? Also, I know a chinese site where we can get the datasheet for this chip if is needed. Will it be worth by looking into those datasheets and find out the similarities between MT76 and this MT6625, then use the mainlined bits from the linux kernel?

[frank-w]

At least this driver i have cannot be upstreamed to mainline as it is huge and dirty.

Some user on bpi-forum told me he asked felix from openwrt (main contributor of mt76 driver) and got response that mt6625 cannot be integrated in mt76,basicly it needs complete rewrite outside of mt76.

As i have not seen register writes in driver yet...only wmt commands translated to mac80211 and cause of much files i still don't know how driver really works...i only try to get it running on newer linux versions by fixing compile errors :)

But if you are experienced with wifi-drivers you're welcome to help. Note that my version of this driver contains only the wifi/bt part.no lte, fm,gps,..some parts i have removed to make it a bit more clear

Driver von bpi/internet is mostly kernel 3.8/4.4,imho i'm the only one who have upported the driver

[alifilhan0]

Unfortunately I have 0 experience in wifi drivers. Currently I was working on a PMIC of mediatek mt6328 to get it running with linux kernel. And as there is no work going about these MT66xx chips in the mediatek upstream group, I don't think we will ever see a mainline driver for this chip. Again the consys driver is also nonexistent, I don't also think there will be a mainline version of this either. We are maybe stuck with the complete mess of vendor code provided as sources. Do you have any idea about any of these chips being worked on in the linux kernel? Because these chips are out there in the market in huge quantities, I have a mediatek phone with MT6627 wireless ic, and again, this is also not supported. The only info I could get from the driver is that it basically selects the channel and loads the firmware of the MT6625 from filesystem. Then the rest work is done by enabling the device and then the firmware. This is all I know

[frank-w]

I only know code for 3.18,4.4 and 4.9 (lede from bpi where my code based of).afair 662x and 663x are compatible

Maybe if you have newer kernelversion on your phone you could ask your phone vendor for source.maybe code is in better shape then the driver i used from 4.4/4.9 but i guess it will depend on android framework so you need changes to make it working with linux kernel

[alifilhan0]

My kernel version is 4.4, as for 90% mediatek phones on the market. The board with MT6735 has kernel source 3.18. It is a big miracle that I got kernel sources for both of these mediatek devices. But again, there is no other way I guess for these MT6625L chips to work in mainline without using those messy drivers. Have you tried building with GPS and Bluetooth for this kernel, regardless the version and did it work? What are the basic changes required to get this messy driver to build with the linux kernel, along with the Bluetooth at least?

[frank-w]

Gps is not included in my version. Bluetooth worked in latest test but not btle

Wifi-client was also not working....only ap-mode

[alifilhan0]

I should look out for this, after the wifi-cient mode is fixed, it will at least be usable with mainline kernel for me. But is there any fix for this problem at this moment?

[frank-w]

I don't know how to fix the client-mode as is was not working in my 4.9 source too,afair 4.4 was working but i have not found out whats the problem

[frank-w]

Vendor posted a 4.14 repo long time after my porting. And mentions wifi client is working

http://forum.banana-pi.org/t/topic/5548

Maybe you can try wifi client from this base and then we can compare differences

[alifilhan0]

Okay, I will try to port in in this week and let you know. Thanks for this

[alifilhan0]

But again, here BT/BLE doesn't work. So something is broken here but working in 4.4. It would take a lot of time I guess. How stable is your 5.4 branch? It does state that BT and WiFi works on the table in README.md doesn't it?

[frank-w]

It works in 4.4? Which codebase? Imho bt needs to be compiled as module and loaded after wmt-loader and stp_uart_launcher called

Btle issue was reported here (without solution):
http://forum.banana-pi.org/t/bpi-r2-kernel-bluetooth-module/4592/64

[alifilhan0]

I think I remember a message in he Bpi forums a few days ago mentioning Bluetooth and WiFi working a bit unstably in kernel 4.4. Maybe that person was talking about the vendor kernel. But by the way, does client mode work in 5.4 main? And maybe there's no hope for this situation to get better, given how bad MediaTek is towards open source. No effort for MT66xx chips, or is there? In the kernel 4.14, BT/BLE doesn't work and is stated there in the description also.

[frank-w]

I do not remember any posting with kernel 4.4 or wifi in last days.client-mode does not work in all my versions including 4.9 (patches from lede and base for 4.14 and further up porting). Bt should work in lts kernels from 4.14,but require load bt chrdev module loaded after wmt commands

Mainline does not support mt6625 at all...only with additional driver in drivers/misc/mediatek like in my repo od bpi repos