After the US trade ban, Huawei accelerated the move from Android AOSP to HarmonyOS. This fragmented the driver landscape further: Kirin 980 devices launched with Android 9 (EMUI 9) now run HarmonyOS 3 or 4, each requiring different driver ABIs (Application Binary Interfaces).
These .ko files are compiled for a specific kernel version. You can cross-reference them with kernel sources (if Huawei released any – they stopped after Kirin 970). hisilicon kirin 980 driver