Archer C6 on 22.03.2 crashes every ~3 days

22.03.2 is stable for me on 25+ Archer C6v3 devices. Some with a handful wifi connections, others with a dozen or more. Some with RPs/APs connected, some without. If there were frequent connectivity issues I would have known one or two months ago. So I think there is something else wrong with your device or configurations. Can you post your wireless and network config with redacted information so I can compare those with what I am running?

I have been an Internet provider for 22 years. Standard to factory configuration without unnecessary magic. Earlier, I made a lot of identical configurations on the TL-WR841n, which worked great on LEDE BOOT for 200 days without power off, to this day, a lot still works on the network with the same configuration. The problem with the 841n may be low on memory because it would work even better with more WIFI users. .. With Archer C6 v3 with Openwrt I had a lot of negative feedback from customers so I stopped installing. I leave it on the factory TPLINK - I can't help it

I can confirm that I have the same issue with 22.03.3 as before.

Can I check, is everyone else using HW offload?

Yeah, totally understandable and it's really strange - there must be some differences that cause that behaviour. @timothyjward You have to enable it manually, right? If so, then no.

I’ve switched to SW acceleration. I should know whether things have improved in a week or so…

i think the problem is the mt7613 5ghz radio. it freeze the device, no dhcp, no static address no lan, sometime nothing work,only a reboot, i observed that on another device.

Hmm, interesting, I just noticed that I have kmod-mt7615 packages installed instead of kmod-mt7613. I didn't even check that since those packages were chosen by default when building my images. Maybe this is the difference between the devices in question here and leads to the top/flop behaviour.

no mt7613, look ,you have mt7663

Hi Guys, I see that you have a big problem to solve. I just wonder if you could spare few minutes for me and let me know how did you get openwrt 22.03.3 factory image loaded and boot up on Archer C6 v3.2? I found many instructions for version 2 but they don't work :frowning:

I see, so I can remove the 7615 packages I guess. Do you have info on the differences between the drivers for 5GHz (7613 vs 7663)? I wonder if this is the culprit and if in general the 7613 is preferable once these issues are fixed.

@MarekSuski
Did you install OpenWrt already on the device or does it still hold the TP-Link original software? If the latter, just connect your Laptop or PC to one of the LAN ports of the router. Then open 192.168.0.1 in your browser and set a login password. Afterwards you can log in with that password.

In the "Advanced" tab you will find a menu on the left where one entry says "system tools" (maybe I got those two entries switched). There is another entry "firmware upgrade/backup". Finally, you'll find the option to browse your Laptop or PC for a custom file to upload. Now choose your factory.bin and say "yes" when prompted by the overlay. The flash and reboot process takes roughly 3 minutes.

Afterwards, your router should have its on/off led and LAN led on, the wifi leds should be off. Your router now has the IP address 192.168.1.1 and you can connect to it via ssh. If you flash an image with LuCI as selected package, you will also be able to open the webinterface by typing 192.168.1.1 into your browser.

@Nihilokrat thank you for your reply. I have still TP-link original software and when I try to install snapshot openwrt-ramips-mt7621-tplink_archer-a6-v3-squashfs-factory on my Archer A6 ver 3.20 as you have described then I get following error message :frowning:


https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=SNAPSHOT&target=ramips%2Fmt7621&id=tplink_archer-a6-v3

Not sure, I suppose you haven't customized the packages, right? Have you tried the 22.03.3 stable version instead of snapshot? Please consider opening a seperate thread, too, since your issue is unrelated to the topic.

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Yes, I have tried. Same issue :frowning:

I would not do this. From a quick search of the commit history I found https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/81b59efefd4c88187a519d09129c97e63900731e

Basically it looks like the 7613 firmware is in the 7663 kernel module and that the 7615 driver is used to control it. Removing any of those will therefore break 5GHz wireless and also possibly brick your router.

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I’m now at 4 days uptime having disabled HW acceleration. Will keep you posted…

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Now at 6 days, which is pretty much a tie with my previous longest uptime. It looks a lot like HW acceleration is the unstable component triggering the fail/reboot. I don't know whether it's also what causes the reboot loop, or if the cause of the looping might be the same as the bug fixed here https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/1af58a2d39c4834bc84b853c2978d47572135af4

Are there any OpenWRT developers here who might know more?

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Can you confirm which settings you ticked/unticked? Last weekend it happened again to me twice in the same day, and it's just happened again after about 5 days uptime for me.

Thanks

I disabled HW acceleration in Network > Firewall

I had been using it to help performance, but it appears to have been the source of my instability.

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thanks - I will give this a go. I had both boxed unticked so will give SFO a go this week...

Note that I am on “stable” release 22.03.3