Greetings,
I am interested in flashing my NETGEAR R7900P router with this firmware but am unsure if it is supported. I searched the table of hardware and found the R7900 but not the R7900P in there. Just wanting to double check before I take the potentially risky step of flashing the firmware on this thing. Getting fed up with NETGEARs horrible interface.
Thanks.
Tim
Nope... the R7900P is not listed in the Table of Hardware and is therefore not supported.
To answer your second question, no the R7900 is not the same. If you attempt to flash the firmware for the R7900 onto your R7900P, you will almost certainly brick it.
Broadcom based, not a very popular platform here.
Netgear's firmware for the R7900P is the same as the R8000P. The only difference is the usb ports. The R8000P is in the OpenWrt database.
https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/netgear/netgear_r8000p
Be aware, the lack of wireless firmware prevents wireless from working. Use R8000P as a forum search term for more info.
If you are inclined, you may be able to extract the firmware from your OEM device or possibly the factory image. I'm not sure where OpenWrt puts firmware but it typically is in /etc/firmware or /lib/firmware.
Could you elaborate on the warning statement? Doesn't the firmware build process build the wireless firmware at the same time? Thanks.
If you install OpenWrt R8000P into your R7900P, it will boot, connect to your modem and the ethernet ports will work. By default, the base install of OpenWrt does not enable the wireless radios and my understanding is they cannot be turned on due to a lack of firmware.
The reason the firmware is not included is due to Broadcom's licensing.
I do not own a R8000P/R7900P but my elderly neighbor does. Since I end up managing it, I looked into OpenWrt. I'm also aware that Netgear stopped supplying security updates (their policy is to stop 2 years after the device is phased out).
Thanks for the explanation. I saw R8000P was on the supported hardware and thought the Broadcom wifi support might have improved for the routers with newer Broadcom chips.
It's rather the opposite...
Rafał Miłecki committed the R8000P to OpenWrt:
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt%2Fopenwrt.git&a=search&h=refs%2Ftags%2Fv22.03.3&st=commit&s=R8000P
On another website, that does not seem to be OpenWrt, he noted that the BCM4365E chipset shared the same firmware as the BCM4366:
brcmfmac4366c-pcie.bin is in the Linux kernel tree:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/brcm
That firmware is in the OpenWrt tree under linux-firmware:
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=blob;f=package/firmware/linux-firmware/broadcom.mk;h=48d986e2183b3d158db2f7c05a4bc16ea048ede6;hb=HEAD
That said, the asus_gt-ac5300, which shares the same chips is listed with wifi unsupported.
Also needs to be said that the product pages are not always in sync with the developers.
I would try emailing Rafał Miłecki about using the linux firmware package.
Difference between R7900P and GT-AC5300 is SoC BCM4908 in Asus vs BCM4906 in Netgear.
The problem with wifi is not really a missing driver/firmware for BCM4365E but rather a missing support for SoC's PCIe in kernel 5.10. 5.15 should finally change this as there's a support for PCIe for Broadcom's 49xx SoC in newer versions of the kernel. Patience, something should move forward soon enough. 