c630/docs/firmware.md

Firmware

The C630's firmware splits into two groups, and the split is about licensing, not difficulty.

What ships in the image

Qualcomm permits redistribution of these, so Fedora packages them and the build installs them:

Package	Files	Enables
atheros-firmware	ath10k/WCN3990/hw1.0/{firmware-5.bin,board-2.bin,wlanmdsp.mbn}	WiFi and Bluetooth
qcom-firmware	qcom/a630_gmu.bin, qcom/a630_sqe.fw	The generic half of the Adreno 630 — necessary but not sufficient

Networking therefore works on a freshly written image. Graphics does not: see below.

What you have to supply

These are signed against per-model keys and Fedora does not ship them, so a stock install has none of them. Nothing about them is unredistributable in principle — the equivalent files for the ThinkPad X13s are in linux-firmware — it is that nobody has obtained permission for this model. See If you have no backup.

The list is not a guess: it is every firmware-name property in the mainline device tree, arch/arm64/boot/dts/qcom/sdm850-lenovo-yoga-c630.dts:

File	Device tree node	Lost without it
qcdxkmsuc850.mbn	gpu_zap_shader	Accelerated graphics
qcadsp850.mbn	adsp_pas	Audio — speakers, microphone
qcslpi850.mbn	slpi_pas	Sensor hub — lid switch, accelerometer, auto-rotate
qccdsp850.mbn	cdsp_pas	Compute DSP offload
qcvss850.mbn	venus	Hardware video decode
qcdsp1v2850.mbn	mss_pil	Modem, stage 1
qcdsp2850.mbn	mss_pil	Modem, stage 2
ipa_fws.elf	ipa	IPA datapath, needed by the modem

They belong under /lib/firmware/updates/qcom/sdm850/LENOVO/81JL/.

The GPU one is worth calling out, because it is easy to assume otherwise: Fedora does ship an sdm845/a630_zap.mbn, but that is the generic Snapdragon 845 zap shader and not what this device asks for. The C630's device tree names qcom/sdm850/LENOVO/81JL/qcdxkmsuc850.mbn specifically, so until you supply it you get an unaccelerated display.

Each file is independent, so a partial recovery is still worth having — qcdxkmsuc850.mbn on its own buys you working graphics.

Confirmed on the hardware

This is not inferred from the device tree. On a machine with the generic Adreno firmware present and the model-signed blob absent, the GPU gets two files in and then stops:

[drm:adreno_request_fw]   loaded qcom/a630_sqe.fw from new location
[drm:adreno_request_fw]   loaded qcom/a630_gmu.bin from new location
[drm:zap_shader_load_mdt] *ERROR* Unable to load qcom/sdm850/LENOVO/81JL/qcdxkmsuc850.mbn
[drm:adreno_load_gpu]     *ERROR* gpu hw init failed: -2

So the generic pieces are necessary and not sufficient, and the zap shader is a hard requirement rather than an optimisation. Two details follow from that trace:

The driver never falls back to sdm845/a630_zap.mbn, even though the file is installed — the device tree's firmware-name pins the model-specific path. Nor would falling back help: the zap shader is signed against the device's own secure-boot chain, and the Snapdragon 845 development board's copy will not validate here.

The display keeps working throughout. msm_dpu binds the panel and the console lands on msmdrmfb regardless, so a failed GPU costs you acceleration, not a picture. A desktop still runs on llvmpipe — though /dev/dri/renderD128 is present even when hw init has failed, so mesa may try freedreno, fail, and take the display manager down with it. LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 in /etc/environment avoids that.

These have to be in the initramfs

msm_dpu probes about six seconds in, while the initramfs is still the root filesystem, and does not retry. Firmware that only exists on the real root is therefore invisible to it:

msm_dpu ae01000.display-controller: Direct firmware load for qcom/a630_sqe.fw failed with error -2

overlay/etc/dracut.conf.d/10-c630.conf puts the Adreno files in the initramfs for this reason, and c630-firmware adds qcdxkmsuc850.mbn once it exists.

Only the GPU needs this. The ADSP, CDSP, SLPI, venus and modem all probe around forty seconds in, well after the real root is mounted, and load from it perfectly happily. That distinction is worth keeping: qcdsp2850.mbn alone is 60 MB, so sweeping the whole firmware directory into the initramfs would inflate it roughly twentyfold for no benefit.

Finding them on a backup

If Windows is long gone from the machine but you kept a copy of the files, one search catches all eight, since seven share a suffix:

find /mnt/backup -type f \
    \( -iname 'qc*850.mbn' -o -iname 'ipa_fws.elf' -o -iname 'bdwlan*.bin' \) \
    -printf '%10s  %p\n'

They originally lived in C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\, in directories named qcdx850.inf_arm64_* and qcadsp*.inf_arm64_*. If the loose files turn up nothing, look for those directories wholesale:

find /mnt/backup -type d -iname 'qc*.inf_arm64_*'

Sizes range from 14 KB (qcdxkmsuc850.mbn) to 60 MB (qcdsp2850.mbn). Despite the .mbn extension they are ELF images, and file should say so:

qcdxkmsuc850.mbn: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, QUALCOMM DSP6, version 1 (SYSV)

Anything reporting as text or HTML is a download that went wrong.

Lenovo does not appear to publish a driver package for the 81JL containing these. If the backups turn up nothing, see If you have no backup — the files are not tied to your individual machine, so yours is not the only possible source.

If you have no backup

Losing the Windows partition is not the end of it, because these blobs are signed per model, not per machine. A copy from any other Yoga C630 works on yours.

The evidence is in linux-firmware itself, which already ships the exact analogous set for the ThinkPad X13s — one copy serving every unit of that model:

qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcdxkmsuc8280.mbn     zap shader
qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcadsp8280.mbn        audio
qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qccdsp8280.mbn        compute DSP
qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcslpi8280.mbn        sensors
qcom/sc8280xp/LENOVO/21BX/qcvss8280.mbn         video

A one-to-one match with the C630's list, differing only in the model. So these files are redistributable once Lenovo and Qualcomm permit it — it is a licensing question, not a technical one.

qcom/sdm850/LENOVO/81JL/ has simply never been contributed. Fedora ships no sdm850 model firmware at all, so it will not turn up in a linux-firmware update. Four sources are known:

Two projects publish C630 firmware. They overlap but neither is a superset of the other, and both are worth knowing about.

WOA-Project — https://github.com/WOA-Project/Qualcomm-Reference-Drivers

Windows-on-ARM driver packages by vendor and model, under Lenovo/YogaC630/. Nine versions are published, 200.0.1.0 through 200.0.19.0; the cabinets differ between them. This is the only source here for the GPU, DSP, sensor and venus blobs:

Cabinet	Contains
qcdx850.cab	qcdxkmsuc850.mbn (zap shader), qcvss850.mbn (venus)
qcipa850.cab	ipa_fws.elf
qcsubsys850.cab	qcadsp850.mbn, qccdsp850.mbn, qcslpi850.mbn, qcdsp1v2850.mbn, qcdsp2850.mbn, WLANMDSP.MBN
qcwlan850.cab	bdwlan.bin, bdwlan.b3* — ath10k board data
mcfg_subsys_ext850.cab	MCFG/* modem configuration
qcsubsys_extension850.cab	ADSP/CDSP runtime modules, fastrpc_shell_*

cabextract or 7z x opens them. Ignore the _nm and _CLS variants; the device tree asks for the plain names. Fetch via the GitHub API's download_url — the raw.githubusercontent.com paths return 404.

aarch64-laptops — https://github.com/aarch64-laptops/build

Files checked directly into misc/lenovo-yoga-c630/, no extraction needed. A narrower set, but with things WOA-Project does not carry:

Path	Contains
wifi/	qcdsp1v2850.mbn, qcdsp2850.mbn, wlanmdsp.mbn, bdwlan.*
wifi/create-board-2.bin/	a prebuilt board-2.bin, and the script that makes it
gpu/firmware/	a630_gmu.bin
acpi/, laptop-lenovo-yoga-c630.dts	the machine's ACPI tables and a device tree

It has none of qcdxkmsuc850.mbn, qcadsp850.mbn, qccdsp850.mbn, qcslpi850.mbn, qcvss850.mbn or ipa_fws.elf. Note wifi/firmware-5.bin is an HTML error page in the checkout, not firmware — Fedora's atheros-firmware ships a real one.

Which to use. For the GPU, DSPs, sensors and venus, WOA-Project is the only option of the two. For the modem and WLAN trio both publish files, and they are different builds — same sizes for the modem pair, different checksums. On this machine both produce identical results, so nothing here distinguishes them; see What the firmware does not fix.

Lenovo's Digital Download Recovery Service. Lenovo builds a Windows recovery image against a machine's serial number and lets the owner download it. That image contains Windows/System32/DriverStore/FileRepository, and therefore the whole set as shipped for your specific machine. Slower than either repository, and untested here.

Another C630 owner. Any 81JL's copy is as good as your own.

Whichever route, drop the result into firmware/local/ and rebuild — see Baking firmware into the image.

What the firmware does not fix

Installing all of it still leaves two things broken, both for reasons that are not about firmware. Recorded here so nobody repeats the search.

Onboard WiFi: everything is in place except a working modem

The name gives it away: wlanmdsp is the WLAN Modem DSP. On SDM845 the WiFi firmware runs on the modem, so ath10k_snoc binds to 18800000.wifi and then sits silent. It logs nothing and fails nothing — it has registered a QMI client and is waiting for service 69, wlfw, which only appears once the modem is up. qrtr-lookup shows what is and is not there.

Everything on the WiFi side checks out:

• ath10k_snoc binds successfully and is not in deferred probe
• the device tree carries qcom,calibration-variant = "Lenovo_C630"
• Fedora's board-2.bin contains a matching variant=Lenovo_C630 entry
• modemst1 and modemst2 hold ~2 MB of real NV data — not wiped

The userspace services are required, and mostly missing by default

aarch64-laptops' WiFi README lists four services. On a current Fedora two of them are now in the kernel, and the other two are packaged but inactive:

Service	Status here
pd-mapper	in-kernel as qcom_pd_mapper — nothing to install
qrtr-ns	in-kernel — the qrtr package supplies only qrtr-lookup/qrtr-cfg
rmtfs	packaged, disabled by default — serves the modem's NV partitions
tqftpserv	packaged, not installed — serves files to the modem over TFTP

sudo dnf install rmtfs tqftpserv qrtr
sudo systemctl enable --now rmtfs tqftpserv

Enabling these took qrtr-lookup from 19 services to 25. A working setup is said to show around 40.

The modem fetches wlanmdsp over TFTP

This is the step that is easy to miss, and the reason tqftpserv exists. tqftpserv serves from /lib/firmware/, and the modem asks it for the WLAN firmware by path:

sudo mkdir -p /lib/firmware/readonly/firmware/image
sudo cp wlanmdsp.mbn /lib/firmware/readonly/firmware/image/

The modem also wants a writable area, and says so in the tqftpserv journal:

[TQFTP] RRQ: /readwrite/ota_firewall/ruleset → unable to open (2), reject
[TQFTP] WRQ: /readwrite/server_check.txt

sudo mkdir -p /lib/firmware/readwrite/ota_firewall
sudo touch /lib/firmware/readwrite/ota_firewall/ruleset
sudo chmod -R 0777 /lib/firmware/readwrite

Watching journalctl -u tqftpserv while starting the modem is the best available feedback channel — it shows exactly which paths the modem wants.

Where it actually stops

The modem boots and then dies at RF front-end initialisation, roughly every 42 seconds until stopped:

qcom-q6v5-mss 4080000.remoteproc: MBA booted without debug policy, loading mpss
qcom-q6v5-mss 4080000.remoteproc: fatal error received:
    RFLM@rflm_qlnk.cpp:1087 [3,3] RF stuck in QLINK start state: 0x0 after maximum
remoteproc remoteproc0: crash detected ... recovering

It never gets far enough to request wlanmdsp, so WLAN never starts.

Three firmware pairings, three distinct failures — worth recording, because the differences are informative:

MBA (stage 1)	mpss (stage 2)	Result
full	full	boots, dies at RF stuck in QLINK start state
_nm	_nm	PBL returned unexpected status — rejected by the boot ROM
full	_nm	MPSS header authentication failed: -3

The _nm ("no modem") variants are the obvious idea — Fedora ships the equivalent modem_nm.mbn for generic sdm845, and skipping cellular RF is exactly what is wanted here. They are not signed for this device and cannot be made to load.

Firmware has been eliminated as the variable

The test that narrows it: both projects publish the modem trio, and their copies differ — the modem pair matches on size but not checksum. Both were installed on this machine, with rmtfs and tqftpserv running and wlanmdsp in the TFTP path. Both produce the identical QLINK failure.

That is worth stating carefully. It does not show either set to be wrong, and it does not make one more trustworthy than the other — the aarch64-laptops copies come from a setup whose support table ticks WiFi, but on a 2019 kernel, and neither set has been shown to work here. What it does show is that changing firmware does not change the outcome.

So the difference is not the firmware, and not the userspace services. What remains is the kernel: that setup ran aarch64-laptops/linux branch gpu, circa 2019 on 5.x, against 7.1.5 here. Both ath10k patches it applied are long upstream — the device tree carries qcom,snoc-host-cap-8bit-quirk from the first of them. Six years of qcom-q6v5-mss churn sits between the two.

That points at a kernel regression rather than anything missing on disk. Confirming it means bisecting or booting an older kernel, which nothing here does yet.

Things that sound like they should help and do not:

• Unplugging the USB WiFi dongle. Different bus, different driver. ath10k_snoc is waiting on the modem, not competing for a radio.
• rmtfs alone. Necessary, not sufficient. Its "failed to update start state" warnings are its optional remoteproc-control helper and are harmless.
• The _nm variants. See above.

Untried, in rough order of promise: the other eight driver versions under Lenovo/YogaC630/ (this machine's UEFI is 9UCN33WW(V2.06) from 2019, and the newest package may not be the right vintage); mcfg_subsys_ext850.cab, which holds modem configuration data; and building board-2.bin from the C630's own bdwlan.* files rather than relying on Fedora's.

Audio is a kernel driver problem

The ADSP runs, the audio services register, and the codec answers:

wcd934x-slim 217:250:1:0: WCD934x chip id major 0x108, minor 0x1

So SLIMbus, the ADSP and the hardware are all fine. What fails is one sub-device of the codec:

qcom-soundwire wcd934x-soundwire.12.auto: din-ports (2) mismatch with controller (6)
platform sound: deferred probe pending: msm-snd-sdm845: SLIM Playback: codec dai not found

The codec's SoundWire block declares two data-in ports where the controller expects six, so it never probes, so the sound card has no codec DAI and never appears. That is a mismatch inside the kernel, and needs a kernel or device-tree change rather than any blob.

One thing worth knowing if you go looking: slim_qcom_ngd_ctrl can probe before the ADSP is ready and log QMI wait timeout. Reloading the module afterwards gets the codec detected, which is how the chip ID above was obtained — but it does not get past the SoundWire mismatch.

Extracting them

The image ships Fedora's qcom-firmware-extract. Run it once:

sudo c630-firmware
sudo reboot

That wraps qcom-firmware-extract and regenerates the initramfs afterwards, which matters — the ADSP firmware has to be available before the root filesystem is mounted, and overlay/etc/dracut.conf.d/10-c630.conf only takes effect on a rebuild.

If it cannot find Windows, mount it yourself and point the tool at it:

lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,FSTYPE,LABEL       # find the NTFS partition
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/windows
sudo mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/windows
sudo qcom-firmware-extract --windows-dir /mnt/windows

qcom-firmware-extract was written for the Snapdragon 8cx and X Elite laptops. If it does not recognise the SDM850, copy the files by hand — they are in Windows/System32/DriverStore/FileRepository/ under a qcdx*.inf_arm64_* directory:

sudo find /mnt/windows/Windows/System32/DriverStore/FileRepository \
    -iname 'qc*850.mbn' -o -iname 'ipa_fws.elf' -o -iname 'qcdxkmsuc850.mbn'

sudo mkdir -p /lib/firmware/updates/qcom/sdm850/LENOVO/81JL
sudo cp <each file> /lib/firmware/updates/qcom/sdm850/LENOVO/81JL/
sudo dracut --force --regenerate-all

Check it took:

dmesg | grep -iE 'remoteproc|adsp|cdsp'

Baking firmware into the image

If you would rather not repeat the extraction on every reinstall, drop the files into firmware/local/ in this repo, mirroring the /usr/lib/firmware/updates/ layout:

firmware/local/qcom/sdm850/LENOVO/81JL/qcadsp850.mbn
firmware/local/qcom/sdm850/LENOVO/81JL/qccdsp850.mbn
...

build/stage2.sh picks them up automatically. They are gitignored, and should stay that way — this repository is public and the blobs are not yours to publish.