Archer C7 V2 - Massive Problems

Installing and Using OpenWrt
61

Give this a spin see if it solves your problem

62

I just installed this lol see if it dies like everything else

63

Thanks for letting us know. Did you by any chance try it with stock 19.07.3 drivers? The release notes state that improvements were made for the Archer C7.

Also, which non-ct drivers did you install?

Thanks!

64

@smeep

I just did

echo "[INFO] Switching WiFi firmware from ct to non-ct ..."
opkg remove ath10k-firmware-qca988x-ct kmod-ath10k-ct
opkg install ath10k-firmware-qca988x kmod-ath10k

echo "[INFO] Done. Reboot required."

... But cannot test ct drivers as then my encrypted mesh won't start. I don't understand why this only seems to be supported by non-ct drivers.

1 Like
65

Slightly better than -ct, measured on 5GHz. like 460Mbit/sec instead of 430MBit/sec iperf3 using 2x2 802.11ac radio at 80MHz channel width.

66

FYI: I just benchmarked this build and it used approx same amount of CPU% as stock OpenWRT while doing WLAN-LAN 5GHz iperf3 traffic (no routing, just wifi-to-ethernet). Is there some switch that needs to be toggled in order to enable HW acceleration? Also, is this acceleration only affecting NAT/routing or is there a possibility it can take some load of sirq?

67

It is only for LAN to WAN to do that activate SFE Offloading in Firewall

69

Hey Pocket_Sevens, where did you find that version of the kmod-ath10k driver? Mine seems to be older than yours.

root@OpenWrt:~# opkg list-installed | grep ath10k
ath10k-firmware-qca988x - 2019-10-03-d622d160-1
kmod-ath10k - 4.14.180+4.19.120-1-1
70

Hey @smeep. I build my firmware from the Master branch, so I'm guessing it's whatever is in the git repository. (My master build is using kernel version 4.19.115, so maybe that's why my kmod-ath10k driver is different.)

1 Like
71

So, it appears in my happiness of better throughput using the non-ct drivers that I've been seeing my 2.4GHz channel lock up lately. I put my IoT devices on my 2.4GHz channel and have all other devices attached to my 5GHz channel. Yet, it still seems to be locking up.

It seems that, no matter the driver set, we seem to be locking up.

So, to try and mitigate most of the headaches, I have the following setup:

  1. Archer C7 V2 running as an AP off of Master branch (version 4.19.115 kernel). I have no idea if the different kernel versions between 19.07.03 and Master causes a difference - I'd like your opinions.
  2. Cronjob that reboots the router every morning at 4.30AM. See the bottom of this page for the section called "Periodic reboot": https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/base-system/cron
  3. 2.4GHz channel set to a width of 20MHz as recommended.
  4. WIFI24watchdog script to check to see if the 2.4GHz channel is locked up. If so, it brings down the 2.4GHz channel and restarts it. Post here: Archer C7 2.4 GHz wireless dies in 24~48 hours

I also am using Samba4 as I have an external drive attached as a NAS device. (Recently switched over from Samba3.6 since 3.6 doesn't seem to appear in the GIT repository anymore.)

This setup seems to give me a (relatively) headache-free experience. Any additional input would be greatly appreciated.

72

ksmbd will give better performance and lower CPU usage than samba.

1 Like
73

Hmm mine didn't lock up today but the wifi 2.4 range decreased significantly plus it accepted my phone, kicked it and reaccepted it and so on while a bad data rate occured. Rebooted my openwrt 19.07.3 archer c7 v2 (non ct) and range, signal , data rate was okay again.

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