I've successfully flashed the openwrt-21.02-nss-qsdk10.0
onto my R7800 router and happy with the stability - so thank you @ACwifidude and the others involved in the process
There were few small issues I encountered while building the code:
Only the Asrock G10 image was built, instead of the R7800 I needed. I had to add these two lines to the diffconfig file:
CONFIG_TARGET_PROFILE="DEVICE_netgear_r7800" CONFIG_TARGET_ipq806x_generic_DEVICE_netgear_r7800=y
instead of:
CONFIG_TARGET_DEVICE_ipq806x_generic_DEVICE_netgear_r7800=y
after manually selecting it with make menuconfig
and comparing the differences.
Also, in the beginning of the thread, the post implies that ath10k-firmware-qca9984-ct
is already compiled in the image ready to be removed should somebody want the non-ct firmware. However, when you build the image, it is not there. Luckily I had a non WIFI way into the router, and I could salvage the situation. Also, the diffconfig file does not build the kmod-ath10k (non-ct) that you can insert after.
I had to add:
CONFIG_PACKAGE_ath10k-firmware-qca9984-ct=y
to the diffconfig file to get the image to bring on the radios during various rebuilds I did. Another problem I encountered is that with the ct firmware, the 160MHz Width does stop the 5Ghz radio from coming on. I am currently with the kmod-ath10k-ct and with the non -ct firmware and then it worked.
I have also applied the NSS scaling suggested by @Ansuel (by manually editing the file) while keeping performance governor. It was stable the whole day, working, online meetings, but it just decided to reboot out of nowhere when the traffic load was very small.
The most impressive is the temperature drop, from an average of 59.5C in the past 7 days (running 19.07) down to 57C running 21.02 + NSS.
I don't game, so not chasing after bufferbloat, nor I need 1Gb LAN as I am still on cable ... very slow What I hoped was better WiFi performance but it seems that one of the laptops is capped at 400Mbits/s anyway, and a short test with a newer one showed an average speed of 650Mbits/s with iperf via WiFi - but this I did not test with the 19.07 stock to have something to compare to.
I would also like to understand more why it is said that WiFi cannot be totally offloaded to NSS, but is too early to start asking questions, I need to read some more first.
Thank you again