ath79: MikroTik RB912UAG: not working Wi-Fi card in mPCIe slot

[Koen Vandeputte]

On 10.12.21 12:13, Denis K wrote:
>> Thomas Hühn <thomas.huehn at hs-nordhausen.de> wrote:
>>
>> We have 5 Mikrotik 912UAG in our Freifunk Network and just build and updated
>> them today with latest tunk .. we moved vom ar71xx to ath79 successfully,
>> so far so good .. thx for your upstream work!
>>
>> The only thing that is not working: we can not get your 2nd wifi card in the
>> mPCIe port up and running. Only the USB Port is working. We have tried
>> several things to switch from USB to mPCIe .. without success:
>>
>> * change the dts file ar9342_mikrotik_routerboard-912uag-2hpnd.dts in
>>    the gpio-export section to have usb_power output = 0 and pcie_power = 1
>>    mPCIe port is powered with 3,3V (measured on in 2 & 4) but mPCIe WiFi
>>    cards (ath9k - mikrotik) are not detected, tried to rescan the PCI bus
>>    as well
>> * change on a running 912UAG i the /sys/class/gpio/power_usb
>>    ../power-pcie/values ... not WiFi Card detection
>> * compare the running und working mPCIe port ar71xx image on the router ...
>>    found out there is gpio52 used, but different latch setup .. our good
>>    gues was that GPIO20 could be responsible for the usb switch for the mPCIe
>>    port .. add gpio20 to the export folder and set it to 1.. but no WiFi card
>>    detection
>>
>> Who has some troubleshooting tips for how to disable the usb port and enable
>> the mPCIe port?
> I've done some tests with RB912UAG-2HPnD and R11e-5HacT.
> It seems that you need to set power-pcie gpio before pci controller
> driver starts. Since it doesn't support hotplug or rescan (I suppose).
> gpio-export starts after, so I've used this temporarily hack in ssr
> node in dts (gpio-hog):
>
> ssr: ssr at 1 {
>      compatible = "fairchild,74hc595";
>          gpio-controller;
>          #gpio-cells = <2>;
>          registers-number = <1>;
>          reg = <1>;
>          spi-max-frequency = <50000000>;
>
>          power_pcie {
>                  gpio-hog;
>              gpios = <7 0>;
>                  output-high;
>          };
>
>          power_usb {
>                  gpio-hog;
>                  gpios = <6 0>;
>                  output-low;
>          };
> };
>
> root at OpenWrt:~# lspci
> 00:00.0 Class 0280: 168c:003c
>
> This workaround works, but it is better to make pci rescan working.
>
> power_usb and power_pcie gpio lines are on the Serial Shift Register (ssr).
> It seems that RouterBoot left both =1. But SSR while init set them =0. Then
> the PCI controller (arch/mips/pci-ar724x) starts... and says: "PCIe link is
> down", remembers this in the internal link_up field and never re-check
> AR724x_PCI_RESET_LINK_UP register bit. When link_up is false, pci read/write
> handlers always return error. When I patched it to actually check link status
> before reading, I had kernel panic with Device bus error when trying to read
> Vendor ID from config register (see "MIPS: pci-ar724x: avoid data bus error
> due to a missing PCIe module" Gabor Juhos patch). It seems that we need to
> somehow reinit the PCI host controller.
>
> Does anyone have any ideas?
>
> Regards, Denis

Checking ar71xx code shows that this same issue is avoided
by simply putting the PCI init function at the bottom of the complete hw 
init sequence function.

So this workaround is fine for me as it's way better
to have working PCI today (and basically mimicing behaviour as done in 
ar71xx)
than no PCI at all out of "principle".

Let's use evolution here iso revolution. :-)

Regards,

Koen