WiFi 6 (ax) adapter

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:

It is good that you are pleased by that, but we tried ath11k, and there are some issues, though. As mentioned earlier.

I can not promise if we will bring all the stories, including technical details about challenges we had with Wi-Fi 6 support. How many cards did we test, why they are not suitable for us and such. I think it would be great, but it will mean that I need to write it first. Maybe later.

But… there is something, which is currently in testing and preliminary result looks good. :crossed_fingers:
Before we can share it with you guys, there are two issues left:

However, something is planned on our social media, stay tuned!

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Right – to Pepe’s point… there’s a world of difference between:

  • I booted a kernel with this module that exposes a usable piece of 802.11ax hardware AND
  • This piece of hardware works and integrates well with OpenWRT/Turris

Right now, I configure my module via text configuration files and bounce a service with systemd. There is no GUI, no means of exporting driver stats to a GUI, or anything of that nature.

I am happy to share to patches (though it’s quite easy to generate the patchset oneself)… but I suspect for the purposes of any kind of official Turris releases, the patchsets are trivial.

Also, keep in mind about what was said earlier in the thread… ath11k requires a lot of MSI interrupts. I’m running this module on a USD ~$200 SBC. That’s just the bare cost of the SBC, with very little software support and no additional hardware adapters. With a more affordable SoC that makes it way into a router that be sold at a reasonable price point. The total cost of this module and SoC was around $500 USD, and that’s not including any kind of software support costs.

Got a QCA6391 (2x2, client) to benchmark this weekend.

Unfortunately, there are many unresolved problems, even with the latest hostapd and wpa_supplicant installed on the router and client, respectively.

While things work, I only get ~440mbps going from router to client, and about ~490mbps in the other direction. This is because the STA will never go any faster than VHT-MCS 9, NSS 2. And to make matters worse, I cannot get the router (QCA9074) to run in either 80+80 or 160MHz modes. So it is basically not much better than what 802.11ac performance offers at this time.

Based on the Linux commits, there are unresolved firmware problems with QCN9074 (I hope that includes fixing 80+80/160 and allowing the client to see HE-MCS!) Will update if more firmware comes out and the problem is resolved.

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Seems like turris does build exactly what I requested 2 years ago.

Sadly I switched already to x86 and and dumb wifi 6 access points but if the product is good maybe I go again with a omnia :upside_down_face:

It seems so…
Any english news (and timelines) about that yet?

But Wi-Fi 6 is not tied to a new Omnia, with a 2,5 GBE or 5 GBE-adapter (for which drivers should be available with TOS v6) and a free mPCIe-slot both current TO and MOX can provide ax-speeds.

I think this is what @Pepe talked about in WiFi 6 (ax) adapter - #77 by Pepe so maybe he knows more?

More ath11k mpcie cards will be available.

Hopefully they will be supported by openwrt and turris.

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Exciting update…

I can say that I have gotten the QCN9074 referenced in an earlier post to start working with all the bells and whistles - 1024-QAM, OFDMA, spatial reuse, etc. - to work! Moreover, it’s stable enough that it’s now my daily driver and my 802.11ac is just a backup.

With a 2x2 QCA6391 low-power radio in my laptop, the maximum bitrate is 1200mbps at earshot. Sitting on a different floor and going through a couple walls, practical speeds (measured by iperf3) from the router to laptop are ~350-400mbps. But, of course, the main benefit of WiFi6 is how dense the environment can be, and the power-savings offered by TWT (the latter of which is also working).

I am currently on a 5.15 kernel with ath11k backports, but had things more or less working on 5.10 as well.

Hi,
you have ~350-400mbps on AX 5GHz through couple of walls? What are that walls from? What is total distance?
Thanks.

Wood ceiling, couple lath and plaster walls. Guessing 40 feet?

I have to try again after I get some more time after work today, suspect that there may be some RF interference nearby as when I am in the my office (router is above me, 15 feet away, only obstructed by a wood ceiling)… I am able to maintain 1200mbps bitrate and see ~650mbps transfers in iperf.

several walls on 40 feet and on 5GHz AX ~350-400mbps sounds me like mission impossible.