Yeah, that's my experience as well. I found that QCA FastPath is more performant compared to the stock Linux software flow-offload.
I'm also using FastPath on my Linksys E8450, of course with my custom build.
For ath10k, there's a patch that also perform tx encap offload to the firmware, tho. I'm using it for my R7800 QCA9984 chipset. This should further improve your WiFi client download performance and reduce CPU load a little on the AP side. Not sure if it is the same for all ath10k chipset tho.
Have tried to move the P9 to the latest snapshot OpenWrt/master branch today. Seems the kernel is now 1.9MB and no longer fits the TP-link partitions. Without serial console access I cannot progress this, and I don't have the soldering skills/hardware to make it happen.
Anybody got any suggestions about how to shrink the 5.10 kernel down?
I'm guessing you got openwrt on the device by first flashing the beta firmware with activated telnet and then using the mtd command to flash your openwrt firmware that you had split with dd?
Because that should still work.
There are no physical partitions and they're defined by the .dts file. So just create a new firmware where the kernel partition is bigger. Or if you're already using a "firmware" partition instead of "kernel" and "rootfs" then that's already good to go and you shouldn't have to change anything.
Doesn't matter that you're not splitting where the partitions in the file switch from one to the other.
@bobthebuilder - thanks for the tip, in the end I decided that without serial access I could not risk bricking them, and flogged them on ebay. I'm Fortunate in my house that he walls are stud and plaster, which means the extra PLC of the deco isn't needed, and a pair of RT3200's with a hardwire MOCA 2.5 coax between them gives me gigabit ready speeds all through the house.
Cannot praise the RT3200 enough, rock solid in my config, and got tons of CPU to host things too.