IPQ6018 with just 256MB of ram

Hi , i'm trying to port snapshot to Z6001AX from ZBTLINK

Device is very similiar to linksys mr7350

Apart from that, let's get straight to the issue

Ath11k driver causes page allocation fault any way i try , no matter what i do

Tried lowering q6_reserved to 0x2800000 , it's the only way i got for a brief moment wifi , to work, as soon i touched something whole thing went sideways

Any idea on how to proceed from here? somehow original openwrtish firmware worked with these hw specs and also had a whole load of cloud s**t etc

Also sorry for the rant, but how the .... is a wireless driver supposed to eat 210 mb of ram with low memory mode too , not openwrt community devs fault ofc ? O.o

https://github.com/tizbac/openwrt/tree/z6001ax this is what is done so far

There's a reason why the forum says Openwrt is a no go using ath11k on 256mb RAM.

512mb is struggling with it as is, because if there's not enough devices connected it ends up rebooting due to oom errors

What i'm wondering more is how non-mainline linux firmware can work using half the ram or something like that , and work let's say fine on same hw
Besides that i learned the hard way this platform is basically trash, ath11k and 12k are complete mess and unstable+unuseable generally even if you have enough ram....

Let's go back to mediatek , this was a test for some new qualcomm 802.11ax devices but i guess ends here... , even if i had 512m or 1gb , having 300mb used by just wifi is completely unacceptable

It's not 'just' the firmware, but also proprietary -different- drivers, as well as a whole boat load of extremely invasive kernel patches and a heavy reliance on NSS offloading. Even with the vendor firmware, devices with QCN50[25]4 and 256 MB are a no go, the memory profiles used there are very extreme (hurting performance).

QCA has opted to go the 'cheap' route of relying heavily for wireless-/ performance reasons, that's all 'fine' if your device is equipped with 'enough' RAM (the problematic part here is that requirements rise steeply with the number of connected clients) - but in reality vendors want to cheap out even more and do not put enough RAM into their devices. Corporate response to that sadly is "make it work, at least on the face of it, whatever the cost" (buzzword bingo spec sheet ticked), rather than "go away and put enough RAM into the device".

512 MB RAM is already very tight for ath11k, 256 MB RAM is hard-fail.

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Well that does not change the verdict, I honestly knew they had 256Mb ram when I bought it, but I was used to mediatek , where on wg108 for example I have still almost 80mb ram free out of 128 with two radios running
I would have never dreamed some company would ever develop something so bad that a wireless driver has more memory footprint than a full fledged desktop GPU driver.

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