Michal Kazior [off-list ref] wrote:

Firmware files are versioned to prevent older
driver instances to load unsupported firmware
blobs. This is reflected with a fallback logic
which attempts to load several firmware files.

This however produced a lot of unnecessary
warnings sometimes confusing users and leading
them to rename firmware files making things even
more confusing.

Hence use request_firmware_direct() which does not
produce extra warnings. This shouldn't really
break anything because most modern systems don't
rely on udev/hotplug helpers to load firmware
files anymore.

Signed-off-by: Michal Kazior <redacted>

While testing Erik's usb patches I noticed one problem if the firmware (or
board file) is not found:

[  517.389399] usbcore: registered new interface driver ath10k_usb
[  517.391756] usb 2-1.3: could not fetch firmware files (-2)
[  517.391985] usb 2-1.3: could not probe fw (-2)

Now the user has no way to know what file is exactly missing. I'll try to
improve that in v2.

-- 
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9237095/

Documentation about submitting wireless patches and checking status
from patchwork:

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/developers/documentation/submittingpatches