Issue utilizing MT7916 on BPI-R3

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I am using the latest snapshot for bpi-r3 trying to utilize Wifi 6E on my device, I can get 6 working from the MT7916 device and everything is working fine with the onboard MT7986. In wireless config I see the default two radios, MediaTek MT7986 802.11ax/b/g/n and MediaTek MT7986 802.11ac/ax/n. If I do not install kmod-mt7916-firmware then I will not see the other two radios for the MT7916 device. So after installing, I can see the MT7916 listed as Generic MAC80211 802.11ax/b/g/n and Generic MAC80211 802.11ax/b/g/n. Generic MAC80211 802.11ac/ax/n turns up as "device is not active" and "wireless is disabled" when I attempt to enable the network I configure. Some strange things I have noticed are

  • Upon adding a new network access point for the first time (in wireless config) band is hidden and I only see Mode, Channel and Width
  • Then after enabling this network access point, I can edit the Band but channel disappears.

I can see both devices running lspci:

00:00.0 PCI bridge: MEDIATEK Corp. Device 1f32 (rev 01)
01:00.0 Network controller: MEDIATEK Corp. Device 7906

Any pro tips to get this running?

Thanks.

2

Adding some notes, it appears 6e is not working on MT7916 firmware based on this discussion over on github. Note that the firmware shared there mt7916_test_fw.zip is the firmware on the opkg repos kmod-mt7916-firmware.