LEDE point of view on proprietary drivers

For Developers
21

Yes, I noticed on some Realtek based (non open source:wink:). And without cfg80211/nl80211 support ??

I'm reworking initially the MT76x2e driver and it should have cfg80211 support. Problem is, it's using kernel 3.8 references to the 80211 headers. And they used an older (more forgiving) version of GCC. Using gcc 6.3 and kernel 4.4.61 at the moment. (Snapshot is already at 4.4.69 I know). I got it finally to build/compile. It's still complaining about missing files at runtime, even I put those files where the driver expects them. Need to look at it a bit closer, the CC 15.05 version that was supplied by the vendor doesn't seem to need them. So I need to figure out to build for efuse, flash or eeprom.

Anway, I'll keep it a community build project, once it works. I'm referencing the sources from Padavan next to the MTK Openwrt SDK files. For some reason, Padavan still is using a version 3.x kernel.

22

Do you have an ETA when the first builds will arrive? :slight_smile: If there is any beta testing that needs to be done, I would like to volunteer.

23

I don't have and ETA yet. It seems I'm patching the patches to the point that I'm rewriting half the code. One has to ask at which time does it become "mine" and no longer some else's patched :wink:

As soon I as have good results on my own device, I will let you know.

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24

How is the patching? I have a similar router ZBT WG3526 16MB. I am experiencing unstable WIFI on MT7603E with latest LEDE/OpenWRT snapshot, worse with LEDE stable release 17.01.4
Btw, where can I get LEDE firmware with patched proprietary driver, can you share with me? Any suggesting, how to get stable WIFI on ZBT WG3526, Thanks!

25

I did manage to patch the MTK sources. But the MT76 driver development continued in the meantime so I choose to use them instead.

Another user here published the compiled MTK binaries here: MT76 precompiled drivers (mediatek wifi is useless in MT7628)

Since he only shares the binary there is less problems with the closed nature of the drivers.

26

as long as you ignore the potential GPL violation of the kernel

27

Thanks! I am going to try that. Well I hope the development of open source MT76 driver will deliver good result. It is getting better, it can be usable if there is only few WIFI connection very close to the router with low traffic. Good luck, I will try the next stable release,

28

Is this true? LEDE documentation says that "LEDE / OpenWrt use only FOSS drivers. Fully open-source support for Broadcom wifi chips is very limited"

29

I’m sure. See: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/hardware/soc/soc.broadcom.bcm47xx

The Broadcom-wl part is proprietary with some wrapper. Even the open source drivers are not that good. DD-WRT has some deal with Broadcom and a NDA for their drivers. For this reason I recommend their fork for the Broadcom based routers. I had the Kong builds running on the Netgear R7000 and R6150. Together with Entware it comes very close to the OpenWRT solution.

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