How to find and install missing firmwares in debian

Question

I installed my debian few days ago, and I had error messages saying that firmwares were missing. I managed to solve this problem by adding manually them into the /firmware folder of my bootable usb key. The Wi-Fi seems to be working well on my laptop, but the dmesg -l err command gives me these errors :

[    5.309587] ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load ath10k/pre-cal-pci-0000:01:00.0.bin (-2)
[    5.309708] ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load ath10k/cal-pci-0000:01:00.0.bin (-2)
[    5.310166] ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load ath10k/QCA9377/hw1.0/firmware-6.bin (-2)

It's the same errors I had when I installed debian. Can someone explain me how to solve them ? I already installed the firmware-atheros package but nothing changed...
The result of the command apt-file search pre-cal-pci-0000:01:00.0.bin does not give me anything also..

Solution

The wireless adapter in your system is apparently quite new, and the buster release version of firmware-atheros does not have the correct firmware.

You can download the newest version from packages.debian.org, at the bottom of that page you can find the link. As you can see from the contents listed there, QCA9377/hw1.0/firmware-6.bin is included.

Usually it might not be a good idea to mix packages from "unstable" with a released version of Debian, but (1) as "buster" has only been released very recently and (2) this file only contains firmware, there should not be any problems installing this new package on "buster".

Use dpkg -i firmware-atheros_20190717-1_all.deb (or whatever the package file is currently called) to install it.

Comments

[rakslice]

The answer at unix.stackexchange.com/a/405015/53365 suggests to me that the cal and pre-cal files are not usually used.

[Caco]

It works for me too, but at that moment I've solved for my atheros wireless driver (ath10k_pci), on a Linux debian-neuromat 4.19.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.67-2+deb10u2 (2019-11-11) x86_64 GNU/Linux system (Debian GNU/Linux 10 Buster), with file firmware-atheros_20190114-2_all.deb found at the end of the debian official packages page https://packages.debian.org/buster/all/firmware-atheros/down‌​load.