WiFi 6 (ax) adapter

Guess my initial post was hidden due to the Amazon link. So the idea is to use cheap external Wi-fi 6 router (the one I found on Amazon is currently discounted for less than 50 Euros. In that way we still keep Omnia as the main router and benefit from auto updates & we get faster speed. That solution was not viable until recently when Wifi 6 routers have fallen in price.

I am sorry if this happened. If someone does not respond to you here on the forum, you could try to urge it our support department to make things clear as the forum is still a community place though. So let’s hope things will be better this time as Wi-Fi cards should estimate arrive in late November, but it could be later.

Would be nice if you/Turris team posted the results somewhere where us normal users could benefit from (to avoid double efforts/work - and maybe participate in necessary beta-testing). Maybe a blog or something like that. Haven’t read about your activities in a while (except for the recident device-project @cynerd started recently).

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Offtopic
Same here for Lte modem. Don’t expect any answer.

Any news regarding that new WiFi cards?

If I am not mistaken, then there were some delays regarding getting Wi-Fi cards from Compex. However, a few days ago, we got a few different samples in m.2 form factor from another company. We need to see if we can get the Wi-Fi card working under Linux reliably. If yes, we can add support for it in OpenWrt.

Things are getting a little bit complicated as the Christmas holidays is ahead of us.

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Thank you for the update!

I’ll keep an eye on this.

Any news on this topic? And did you receive the Compex cards by now?

I still don’t have any good for you guys. We are ordering more and more samples from different manufactures.

Our kernel developers are doing as much they can to have any Wi-Fi 6 card working with our devices, but it’s a bit complicated. I can share with you that ath11k cards require 32 MSI interrupts, and we are digging into it right now! More details hopefully soon. On the other hand, ath11k is not present in OpenWrt master, yet.

But let’s focus on bring side, right? It seems that devices based on chipset Mediatek mt7915 and drivers are already present in OpenWrt, so we will see. :crossed_fingers:

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I have been trying to bring up the QCN9074 (5ghz reference SKU – pn02.7) on a non-Turris board for awhile now.

No dice. I am able to get the board to power-on, have tried the ath tree on git.kernel.org… in addition to rebasing various commits from the same and the mhi tree onto a 5.10 tree. The card is detected fine, but seems to fail shortly after downloading the firmware, if it even manages to get that far.

What others have said about the PCI-e bandwidth limitations is real. This what the kernel tells me when I run the QCN9074 on mPCIe 2.0 (x1 link):
[Mon Mar 22 01:16:50 2021] pci 0000:01:00.0: 4.000 Gb/s available PCIe bandwidth, limited by
5.0 GT/s PCIe x1 link at 0000:00:13.0 (capable of 15.752 Gb/s with 8.0 GT/s PCIe x2 link)

FWIW, the QCN6391 should work fine at this point, though. Perhaps not in a OpenWRT router, but definitely upstream. I can’t verify it as I haven’t tried it.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that Compex is pushing out a QCN9074 in mPCIe form!

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I will definetely switch to that new compex cards H2 and H5. But for now there is no linux driver. We need to wait for ath11k.

A post was merged into an existing topic: Cheap wifi adapter

Hi,

This is my very first post in this forum as I’m soon to be a new owner of an Omnia, upgrading from a Linksys WRT3200ACM, among other reasons AX support and potentially beter speed when my ISP offers it.

I’m playing a bit of a devil’s advocate but if you are already considering moving into a new hardware platform and AX aren’t you better served if you used mainline Linux, i.e Ubuntu Server with the appropriate drivers?

I can’t tell if ubuntu provides better support for drivers, but OpenWRT is designed for routers while ubuntu is not, so I’d wonder it ubuntu provided better alternative…

There isn’t any working ax-support yet and it will still take several months until it is really stable after the driver support is there.
So buying a TO for giving you ax-support is still a bet on the future. In terms of all other things there is no real advantage of the TO yet compared to a WRT3200ACM (I own a WRT32X myself) if you are not up to serious modding.

the other part of your post is off topic

The other part depends on your usage scenario.
If you need a firewalling device with max throughput, use something like pfsense/opnsense within a VM, if you want a device with good Wi-Fi, go for OpenWrt on dedicated hardware. If you want server OS, go for Ubuntu server. Although this will maximize your network efficiency it will also make your electricity meter turn much faster, as you will loose the power efficiency of AIO-devices like TO/MOX.
But I can tell you using dedicated devices solved a lot of smaller and bigger problems for me so I stayed with a dedicated server machine with 40GBE internal network access and 1 GBE internet uplink running OpenWrt as router VM, Ubuntu server VM with pihole and wireguard as DNS/DHCP/VPN and another VM for webservices (nextcloud/dokuwiki/jitsi meet and alike) + 1 WRT32x + 1 TO hosting 3 Wi-Fi cards to serve two different floors.
But I also use one single TO as a LTE-modem/Wi-Fi-router in my allotment, where I do not need 10GBE…
For both TO I really hope they will get Wi-Fi ax-support some time :slightly_smiling_face:

Thank you for the perspective.

I suspected there wasn’t much advantage between the WRT3200ACM and TO if you look above and beyond the additional Flash and Storage and the modularity which all give you a lot of freedom is you’re adding components and plugins to OpenWRT to play with. In my case, learn from.

One more bit and I’ll drop the topic. If you move into a platform like the HK01, assuming you have the cash to spare in these times, you could argue that power usage efficiency is back on track so perhaps still using mainline makes sense?

I got the QCN9074/ath11k working on an upstream Linux kernel today! Backported a mountain of patches to 5.10 series kernel.

it runs hot - ambient temperature is about 16C and the module sits around 60C. I would not be comfortable powering this over 5V/PCI-e personally… maybe the little sibling chipset, but the full enchilada QCN9074 probably needs a dedicated 5V power supply.

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Which OS do you use, which kernel mods, which driverversions?
Did you do throughput-tests?
Thanks a lot for sharing!

It is running Debian GNU/Linux with a custom 5.10.31 kernel. OpenWRT would probably work fine as long as there is one that is bundled with a 5.10 kernel. There are about 200 patches I cherry picked from the atheros tree that need to go on top of 5.10, otherwise stuff just works great.

I do not have an 802.11ax client to test with, but my 802.11ac client was doing 450mbps or so on 5ghz 80mhz spectrum. I imagine with 160mhz and 802.12ax, it will blow past 1gbps rates.

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The card you are using is one of the bigger Compex cards (PN02.1), right? The smaller (WLE3000H2/H5) should be more suitable for using in embedded devices. What exact hardware did you use?
Testing with a proprietary client (if available) would be fine as well. Did you test DFS channels and all the channels available in your country?
Could you list all patches you included so @Pepe and the other guys from Turris team can work on integrating this into one of the next releases? :star_struck: