I was wondering whether the Linksys EA8300 is now officially supported upon now, as this PR (forum thread: Linksys EA8300) from @jeff has been closed and whether it is easy to install OpenWrt on it (no serial connection or anything).
Besides that, are there any tri-band routers, with decent Wi-Fi performance, which are supported from OpenWrt? For now the price doesn't matter.
Mostly I am looking for a stable and high throughput Wi-Fi on 5GHz with a couple (~5-8) devices (continously growing) and a good Wi-Fi coverage for 2.4GHz, which can handle a bunch of clients (~10 - only SmartHome devices like smartplugs, google home, hue and such; Those don't need any significant amount of traffic, but a stable connection).
So far I tried Linksys WRT3200ACM, which is unfortunately not performing very well with that amount of clients and TP-Link Archer C7 v5, which wasn't that nice either - I guess the hardware is just not that decent.
ipq40xx: Add support for Linksys EA8300 (Dallas)
The Linksys EA8300 is based on QCA4019 and QCA9888 and provides three,
independent radios. NAND provides two, alternate kernel/firmware
images with fail-over provided by the OEM U-Boot.
Installation:
"Factory" images may be installed directly through the OEM GUI.
[...]
I have on my list to include a full set of screenshots on how to avoid signing up with a Linksys account on first boot, though I believe that simply not plugging in "Internet" connectivity can accomplish it as well.
Can you say anything about the Wi-Fi performance/coverage so far?
I saw you have it for quite a bit now and also remember a comment of you stating, that the performance on far and mid range is better than with another device of you (can't actually remember whether it was a Linksys WRT*).
Thanks for your effort of bringing Openwrt onto this device!
Notably better than my Archer C7v2 units in my application, with the caveat that my measures of performance are more about connectivity and reasonable throughput over the area, rather than raw throughput a meter or two away.