Adding OpenWrt support for Xiaomi AX3600 (Part 1)

For Developers
335

I've just received my AX3600 and set it up as a repeater (via Wi-Fi rather than wired). I downgraded to .17 and everything was very straightforward thanks to all the posts here.

I've noticed one issue. My main router is 192.168.1.1. When the AX3600 connects, it is 192.168.1.250. When I connect a device to the network via the AX3600 it gets a 192.168.1.X address however the connected device is not listed as a connected client when I look on the main router. I am guessing this is because its not using the main router's DHCP.

I'm new to OpenWRT but comfortable with Linux. I notice dhcrelay is installed and in /etc/config/dhcrelay there is the following:

        option 'enabled' '0'

        # IP address of the server
        option 'dhcpserver' '192.0.2.10'

My understanding is that I should be able to set enable to 1 and the dhcp server to 192.168.1.1 and this should work. I also tried:

root@XiaoQiang:~# dhcrelay -i br-lan -a 192.168.1.1
Requesting: br-lan as upstream: Y downstream: Y
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Relay Agent 4.4.1
Copyright 2004-2018 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/
Listening on LPF/br-lan/88:c3:97:ca:34:cd
Sending on   LPF/br-lan/88:c3:97:ca:34:cd
Sending on   Socket/fallback

And got the above which means it should work but it's not. Has anyone tried this before?

Also, assuming I can get it working, how can I make the changes persist? do I need to issue a uci command?

EDIT: After trying a few thing, I ended up bricking the firmware and started again. After further testing, with .17 release, if the device has a permanent IP assigned to it in the main router then it is assigned it also on the AX3600. However, it's not listed as a connected client on the main router. In any case, it seems to be partially communicating in some way.

336

@paulmorabito
Doesn't this device has a /etc/config/network file? If so you could just set up the lan interface with type='bridge' and It should work.

1 Like
337

Yes. You are right. It does have.

338 
mtd18: 01249000 0001f000 "rootfs_data"
mtd19: 012e4000 0001f000 "data

How to backup these two partitions? dd fails, probably because they're mounted.

root@XiaoQiang:/tmp# dd if=/dev/mtd18 of=/tmp/mtd18
[  346.250859] ubi0 error: ubi_open_volume: cannot open device 0, volume 2, error -16
dd: can't open '/dev/mtd18': Resource busy
root@XiaoQiang:/tmp# dd if=/dev/mtd19 of=/tmp/mtd19
[  367.779048] ubi1 error: ubi_open_volume: cannot open device 1, volume 0, error -16
dd: can't open '/dev/mtd19': Resource busy
1 Like
339

Hi, I have a question: if the ax3600 can be updated with openwrt, can the Mesh feature still be used? thanks

340

Not yet, but maybe close?
See i.e. IPQ807x SoC Investigation / Status [WIP]
and Xiaomi AX3600 INT firmware

341

I'm curious, does the QCA9889 IoT WLAN card of the AX3600 support (non-concurrent) dual-band or does the phy only allow one of them?

(I assume it's mostly meant for 2.4 GHz operations, but the chipset would also support 5 GHz - depending on the phy and rf setup, just curious if the OEM firmware allows both (even though OpenWrt can't access it yet)).

1 Like
342

In marketing materials it was stated that "AIoT antenna is dualband"

2 Likes
344

Yes, you are correct and it works well.

345

Is OpnWRT at a functioning working stage on the Xiaomi AX3600 yet?

Has their been much success yet?

1 Like
346

Nothing new at the moment.

347

no, at the moment.

348

Do you see any limitations in using this router once it is supported by openwrt? Like VPN or SQM throughput because of slow cpu clocks or so?

349

Considering the massive cpu speed and the fact that we added support (not upstream but with custom build) for the additional nss core... Think when it will be supported it will be a beast

4 Likes
350

I was asking because afaik SQM will only run on a single core and that's only clocked at 1 or 1.2 ghz iirc.

351

Hello, Could someone tell what is the ethernet controller and Ethernet driver used in Xiaomi AX3600?

352

Yes.

And yet the power supply is still 12 volts and a mere 2 amps, only 24 watts!

Much lower power requirements (and much lower power consumption) compared to previous Qualcomm IPQ chipsets.

353

so can we expect the huge work done on nss cores for ipq806 to be useful also to get nss support for ipq807?
this would be amazing! also because of the wider possibilities of ipq807 nss cores
the RAX120 is still far too expensive, but maybe.. :slight_smile:

354

actually the work is already done... (wifi will still be problematic as nothing has changed in that part)
For everything else... well we already had done the bigger part... (supporting nss for ipq806x means that any soc that use nss is also supported)

1 Like
355

Yeah, NSS for IPQ807x should be a matter of correctly adding the targets into Makefiles so that relevant stuff is enabled and thats it.

I gave up on IPQ807x in OpenWrt until kernel 5.9 lands as it was just too much backporting all of the time.

2 Likes