Best driver/firmware for R11e-5HacT (QCA9880, ath10k)

Hi all,

I have a custom board with a Jetson TX2 and I am using mikrotik R11e-5HacT (https://mikrotik.com/product/R11e-5HacT) via miniPCIe as the wifi card of my system.

I managed to get the driver recognized with the ath10k driver in my kernel (4.4.159) and I have used FW version (just because it looked like the latest): 10.2.4.70.70.

After reading this forum and others I realized that there is a CT version and even a CT-HTT version of the firmware and that CT has their own patched driver.

I know it has been talked a lot in the forum but I couldn't find anything concrete:

  1. Which FW/driver is the best for my module? is it the CT or classic? should I use the CT driver regardless?
  2. What features are missing from the CT firmware? only the mesh? anything else?
  3. Can any of them work in AP+STA mode (i.e. wifi repeater/extender)?
  4. Is there a specific version of the FW (classic or CT) that is known to be stable?

CT is an inferior version of mainstream ath10k driver. it fixed few bugs and some guys here immediately jumped the gun and switched all devices to that version. at the same time it introduced about twice new bugs.
just stick to the QCA driver.

Thank you @psyborg for the answer!

Can you use the ath10k as STA+AP? I want to use it to repeat a wifi signal but not go to mesh protocols.

yes you can use it as a repeater with AP+STA combination

Thanks.

What about stability of QCA9880 based chips with ath10k? is there any known driver/card combination that works better than others?

I can't tell you that. I have a pair of lightbeams but it is impossible to test because power company here is always screwing around with power distribution and it's almost impossible that both devices pass more than 15days of uptime because there will be power outage at least on one end.
Last year I had my battery powered router running for 227 days and checking reassocciations count in log due to power outages it was like 60-70. Fucking absurd!

Sorry for the ignorance but what is a lightbeam?

https://openwrt.org/toh/ubiquiti/litebeam_5ac_gen2

Which firmware version and driver/kernel are you using?

OpenWrt SNAPSHOT r10011-71ab2c9 / LuCI branch (f138fc93)
4.14.118
kmod-ath10k 4.14.118+4.19.32-1-2
ath10k-firmware-qca988x 20190416-1

About the kmod-ath10k 14.118+4.19.32-1-2 - it means it is back ported from 4.19.32 kernel to your kernel?

1 Like

yes, but you don't need to do anything special as its already done via backports package

Noob fourm manager if you dont want some off-topic thread appear,please provide PM function at least
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Hi man!I found some old topics which talks about the ralink chip stuff but some github link dead,what had them talked about?did they provided any patches or some other stuff to make it works,i wanna do some reasearch on the new Mediatek re-branded chips,and dont know whether if its possible