802.11ax Routers

Wait two more weeks until the short-term confidentiality is over and we should be able to look at the internal FCC photos and tell exactly what components it has and what the chances are for it to ever support OpenWrt or not...

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I wonder which of the routers Xiaomi AX6000 or Xiaomi AX9000 has more chances to get OpenWrt support / official firmware? Thanks for your opinion!

AX9000 as its IPQ8072A based while AX6000 is IPQ5018 based.
BTW, there is already work on it, QCN9024 PCIe card being the biggest issue currently.

Yes, I know. However, unless I missed anything the RAXE500 is not (yet) listed anywhere.

Review:

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And you run OpenWrt on all of those?

Pretty sure it's the samba4 + all dependencies that's filling up the flash, not the luci app :slight_smile:

Depends on the AC device you're comparing it with, doesn't it?

A somewhat off-topic question: Is there any 11ax / WiFi 6 Wave 2 devices out there currently?

Cheers.

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Someone mentioned the WAX214 & WAX218 (IPQ6018, don't know the wifi). Well, netgear has something on their download site for them. It's openwrt based, there's no sources, and it appears to run Linux 4.4 and use gcc 5.2, holy shit this is a prehistoric thunder-turd. From WAX218_V2.0.1.0_source.tar.gz, we get files like: build_dir/target-arm-openwrt-linux-muslgnueabi_gcc-5.2.0/root-ipq/lib/modules/4.4.60/

Same general story with WAX610, WAX620, WAX630. This time the source download is actually sources at least, but again almost everything in this archive is >5 years old too.

I was rather hoping. I almost went out & bought a WAX214, given that they're cheap & 802.11ax, and qualcomm, but wow, not gonna hold my breath any longer having seen that.

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Since you've both AX3600 and E8450 running, which one would you recommend? Pros and cons?

Cheers.

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Well, from a hardware point of view the AX3600 is clearly much more capable. However, from a software point of view it is the other way around. The E8450 is already merged into the master branch and available in snapshots so one does not need to do his own builds. OpenWrt for the AX3600 on the other hand is still in heavy development. Another thing is the initial installation. While trivially easy for the E8450, the AX3600 pretty much requires serial access (BTW: 1.8 volts only!) and is quite a little bit more involved. So unless you are familiar with low-level OpenWrt stuff I would not recommend the AX3600 for now.

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i have recently purchased D-link dir-x1560 which has good space and ram and also mesh router.

Hope some body help or is there any wip?
please guide
thanks

Chances for that are just about zero.

i know but if some, its broadcom and somemore mesh.

No USB ...

Yes no usb, so does it make any difference.
Can you suggest me best router of the same range supported by openwrt.

At a reasonable price i have only found KuWfi Tenbay WR1800K WIFI-6 but only 16M SPI Flash
5 * Lan + USB3

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/kuwfi-tenbay-wr1800k-wifi-6/99090/3

i have replaced SPI with a 32M MX25L25635E

Likely never, but interestingly the Asus AX3000 also uses the BCM6750 but has double both the ram and flash memory as that D-link. It's supported by Asuswrt-Merlin which is a solid firmware. As far as OpenWrt, there is nothing with a strong CPU and USB 3.0 that is supported by OpenWrt yet, who know when, probably it's a ways off.

I generally agree with the comments on the AX3600, but would have a slightly more positive outlook.

The price is hard not to like: €69 delivered in Europe, or closer to €80 since the VAT change in July.
I've never opened it up or used a UART with it. The JS-paste-into-browser method for initial SSH bring-up is not ideal (or guaranteed into future factory firmware revisions, I guess), but is trivial and 100% local compared to the OpenWRTInvasion method needed for MediaTek Xiaomi routers.

During working on a WDS few bugs recently, I soft-bricked and recovered using the built-in blind TFTP recovery a number of times - again, no UART needed.

Many of the open issues seem to be generic ath11k or IPQ807x things, rather than AX3600-specific.
robimarko's OpenWRT branch is good enough to be my live home router now. The known bugs feel close to being solved (but that is often the perpetual case with these things - ha!), and are often about back-porting things from Linux mainline - which is where OpenWRT itself will be going in good time. Acceleration/offload is only a nice-to-have at my WAN speed, but also seems to be making good progress.

I do wish it had USB...

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