MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - PW3 Kindle Paperwhite 3 Schematics and Mainline u-boot/Linux

bdm310 · 03-17-2021, 01:21 AM

The PW3 uses a AR6803G wifi chip. This seems (so far) to be an AR6003 in a QFN package for some reason. In any case, with the right SDIO stuff in the device tree and an OS that has ath6kl built in, wifi is brought up on boot.

ath6kl needs some board specific configuration data in the form of a bdata.bin file in (on Fedora, at least) /lib/firmware/ath6k/AR6003/hw2.1.1/ . Without this connectivity didn't seem to work well even though it would associate and pull and IP.

There's some reference design config files in there by default, "bdata.SD32.bin" is identical to a bdata.bin pulled from my stock partition images. Copying or linking "bdata.SD32.bin" to "bdata.bin" should result in functional wifi. Unfortunately the default fallback for ath6kl is bdata.SD31.bin, thus the need for some manual steps.

03-17-2021, 01:21 AM	#3
bdm310 Junior Member Posts: 3 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2020 Device: Kindle Paperwhite 3	The PW3 uses a AR6803G wifi chip. This seems (so far) to be an AR6003 in a QFN package for some reason. In any case, with the right SDIO stuff in the device tree and an OS that has ath6kl built in, wifi is brought up on boot. ath6kl needs some board specific configuration data in the form of a bdata.bin file in (on Fedora, at least) /lib/firmware/ath6k/AR6003/hw2.1.1/ . Without this connectivity didn't seem to work well even though it would associate and pull and IP. There's some reference design config files in there by default, "bdata.SD32.bin" is identical to a bdata.bin pulled from my stock partition images. Copying or linking "bdata.SD32.bin" to "bdata.bin" should result in functional wifi. Unfortunately the default fallback for ath6kl is bdata.SD31.bin, thus the need for some manual steps.