Thanks for replying to my question. I tried WDS before with 23.05, and iirc the performance was good. But one (or both) of my routers would freeze sporadically with DAWN running in the background. Will try and see if 24.10 + WDS + DAWN will coexist happily. Thanks again.
Hmmm one more thing... I now have VLAN up and running over the 802.11s link (by following this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIKwOPwtTJU). But I am not sure if VLAN-over-wifi is supported with WDS.
Yes, WDS does support VLAN-over-WiFi. WDS is basically a transparent VLAN-unaware Ethernet bridge. The only advantage of 802.11s is that it allows dynamic topology changes, ie. AP/STA roles are not assigned.
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For whatever it's worth, I've used three of these devices all linked by WDS on 5GHz to offer main and guest WiFi networks with 802.11r (I experimented with the other extensions but they gave no discernible benefit) on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz for many years now and it's been rock solid. I use VXLANs to pass e.g. the 2.4GHz data over the 5GHz link. Works really well.
I'm now curious what the difference between VXLAN and VLAN-over-WiFi might be.
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Just to report back - tried WDS, it didn't play well with DAWN at least in my setup (it brings down the entire wireless network for a few seconds every couple of minutes). But I have found DAWN to be the only way to successfully enable active steering to the best AP. Decided to retain DAWN, and set the 802.11s to "no encryption". This magically gives me back the normal bandwidth between the mesh nodes (~300mbps), so except for the obvious security concern, my problem is now solved. I plan on adding wireguard and shove the underlying mesh link to its own firewall zone to address the security issue. But for now everything works well once again, VLAN + performance + active steering wise.