They use their own wireless driver package, which is independent from the linux kernel: https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=153685#p761102
"Since at the moment v6 and v7 uses identical driver and software for wireless, your observation is most likely a coincidence. The performance should be the same, signals also."
Wave2 being WIP for more than a year it's a signal of the driver being written by them (not the firmware which should be the QCA provided) otherwise they could just deprecate their old AP daemon in the development branch for beta testing purposes
Amen, that is requirement #1 for any networking solution, all the rest is gravy, or meaningless if absent.
Even the most widely supported Atheros platform, the Archer C7 has been suffering from flaky Wifi ever since 18.06.x (I have a fleet in varied deployments).
MT76 is supposed to be very well supported due to more extensive OpenSource implementation, and it does have very nice features and smooth performance (when working). But suffers from lack of stability/reliability when running under load for hours.
I would love to be able to do more than just complain about issues I see and report useful data to the dev's, but I'm not aware of a decent guide for the more technical users (but not devs) to follow to capture the information that would be useful in resolving the problems. Stuff like what system vars to capture, log-levels for the various elements, etc.
For instance: How to tell the AP is 'stuck' and what data needs to be gathered, then which process needs to be restarted?
That might even be helpful in creating a watchdog script to 'unstick' current flaky wifi.
Thumbs up for ath9k. Here's Felix Fietkau on the state of wireless drivers and he explains what went into making ath9k soooo good. Yes it's old, but he gives a good summary of different wireless drivers as well. He's the main developer on mt76 (the best successor to ath9k hardware in terms of stability in my opinion). What a rock star, wish he gave more talks.
That issues list is misleading since the mt76 covers a multitude of devices, all of which report issues to the same place.
Support for a device will go for a long as there is someone who wants to maintain it. Even the 4/32 devices could be maintained to receive security updates backported to a version of OpenWrt they can run - but only if someone wants to invest the time and effor to do so. And if it happens, it'll be someone like you @BenSisko who does it for their own device because no one else has, and if someone else happens to get use of it, well, that's ok too..
I just added OpenWrt support for a device that was 1 of less than 500 and the ODM went under in 2015 :D. Doesn't mean it can't be supported.
I totally agree. I can't say objectively if one driver has less issues then mt76 but my sense of it is that at least like you said with community effort and interest, all of these issues can be addressed because of mt76's openness. At least we're not stuck with a binary blob from some corporation that we can't hack away on. Would be interesting to see a comparison of other driver issues that are a result of blobs. Thanks for making openwrt a little more ubiquitous.
I know it's wandering off topic, but with MT being as "supportive" of the aftermarket firmware community, has anyone actually out-reached to them about testing their home-grown drivers as they Pre-release and dev them? Nothing breaks code faster than a user touching it, and they might be open to the assistance.
If that is the case, and it very well might be (I honestly was asking the question I did because I don't know), then I wonder why any compatibility/driver/blob issues are present. If they aren't beholden to BCom/QComm (someone mentioned they roll their own drivers?), then that any outstanding issues exist is.. disheartening..
I was under the impression there might be a few MT employees contributing in their spare time, and was asking if anyone had formally approached them to say "Look, lots of people like your stuff. You've got people who want to help make it the best it can be, and in the process, you get to reap everything gained from it internally because it's opensourced..."
In my experience, you should never, ever, let developers and programmers talk to your end-users. The OpenWrt community is a place that bridges the gap between the engineers and programmers and the "general informed public". Present it like that and maybe they'll ready-up some resources.
Ok, I didn't know he works for Mediatek. Still, is he employed by them to do this or just does it in his free time? Frankly both answers suggest MT doesn't care.
