I have an RT-N66u and an RT-AC66u. All the reports I can find are from 2015.
Does anyone here have knowledge of whether the poor Broadcom support has gotten better in 18.06?
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There is little to no chance that the situation will 'ever' improve for softmac based Broadcom wireless cards, unless Broadcom does a 180° turn in terms of their FOSS policies and suddenly starts providing (mainline-) drivers for their softmac devices - which is …unlikely.
If you want to run OpenWrt with wireless support, you'll need to switch to different -supported- hardware.
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OK, thanks. My primary motivation is to make this hardware useful, not to use OpenWRT. I had hoped that there would eventually be some progress on cleanroom drivers for these chips, but you're right that it's a faint hope.
As it turns out, Asus Merlin has been forked ("John's fork"), and is being maintained again. That looks like a better option for me.
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There is little to no chance that the situation will 'ever' improve for softmac based Broadcom wireless cards, unless Broadcom does a 180° turn in terms of their FOSS policies and suddenly starts providing (mainline-) drivers for their softmac devices - which is …unlikely.
Wait; what?
According to this list Broadcom have been developing a firmware based mainline soft mac driver as part of brcm80211- labelled brcmsmac.
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/brcm80211
The RT-N66u has a BCM4331, which is very old. So it's easy to understand why there may be issues as it was sold before Broadcom came around to open source.
Slightly more modern Broadcom wifi SoCs stand a pretty good chance of working (even if not right out of the box) in openwrt.
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