[Help Needed]Lantiq WAVE 300 Tp-Link W8980 v1

For Developers
1

First of all, thanks to everyone contributing in this community. Your efforts are appreciated every day.

Now, to my scenario, I have a Tp-Link TD-W8980 V1 router running with latest Openwrt 18.06.1 with ADSL2+. I understand that this device has 2 radios with 5GHz not having (proper) support yet. I remember there were people working on it quite some time ago and those topics might be somewhere within the archive although they might be lost/not available now. But as you might know Tp-Link provides GPL source codes for its devices and it's available for this one too at Tp-Link GPL Code.

I have downloaded the archive, tried to snoop through it and found some stuff that I think might not be relevant here like the Linux OS drivers and stuff. But the typical thing that I want to talk about is the Lantiq WAVE 300 driver. Also I am confused here because in the tar file there is a lantiq folder and that contains a lot of stuff I know nothing about but opening some files in Visual Studio revealed that they belong to Openwrt.org under the GPL licenses.

I am not an expert for developing under Openwrt but I am willing to learn about it and I think this might be my first ever 'give back to community' kinda thing and I am hoping that folks here maybe able to help me along the way and right now to point me in the right direction to start.

Back to the above case, the Lantiq folder contains modules/wave300/ and this contains hostapd-lantiq and lq-wave-300-xxxxxxx.src. So my understanding is that I need this module to create the driver for the 5GHz radio. But how? I mean I am a newbie developer, created some code and apps but I have only worked in C++ in past and now working with C# in Windows. So programming for Linux is not my thing yet but I think it would not be much different anyway.

So where do I start and how should I proceed with this GPL code? It says I can redistribute it with modifications along with the License. I am thinking I can create a repo at GitHub and work my way through that. But the language I believe is C within these files. So I may need to learn some extra stuff before getting my feet wet.

Anyway, I would really appreciate it if someone has some advice for me about where to start and how to proceed with it. Thank you.

2

You might find it useful to start by reading the old thread at https://forum.archive.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=45047&p=1.

3

Well as it turns out, Lantiq based drivers are stated as being proprietary software and cannot be changed even under the GPL, as it has been stated in their license file.

4

Hello,

I am one of the developers from the old forum that is also seeking to make the WAVE 300 work.

I have made a new thread to track the issue, perhaps you may find it interesting.

As far as the GPL issue goes, as was written on the old thread, it is probably in the best interest of the community to first make the driver work, and then try to resolve the licensing issue possibly by contacting Intel.

Intel has generally been a great supporter of OSS and OpenWRT, and it is likely also in the best interest of Intel to have mainline support for this chip. I believe the decision to change the license to proprietary was made by Metalink or Lantiq before being purchased by Intel.

Anyway I wouldn't worry too much about the GPL issues if the driver doesn't work in the first place, so I believe that's the first step.

Good luck,
Vittorio

5

Well I kinda lost hope but I am trying to set up my build environment once again. If I run into any issues, I may contact you for help. Thanks for reaching out to me. I really appreciate it.