Mr8300 and MU-MIMO/Beamforming and general information

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

hey all,

I have a Linksys MR8300 and it is advertised as supporting Beamforming, MU-MIMO- and 2x2 data streams.
Ive been using OpenWrt for about a month now (recently moved to SNAPSHOT r21965-6f89a0ca20)
What i would like to know is if these features are still present in OpenWrt and how to configure them if they are.

Another thing is Linksys advertises Bluetooth on this router yet there is no mention of it in the table of hardware, why is this? I know the linksys EA8300 is extremely similar to the MR8300 and it has bluetooth listed as unsupported.

lastly i would like to ask some best practices for OpenWrt/MR8300 as i am a new user :smiley:

Thank You for reading :smiley:

2

The bluetooth is likely there also in the MR8300. Looking at the board photos, there is a small onboard antenna which I suppose it doesn't belong to the wifi radios. So I assume the internal bluetooth is wired to this antenna.

Probably there is no mention because at the official Linksys specs there is no mention about it.

3

Thats strange as the specs for the UK version (the one i have) it says it has support for Bluetooth 4.1/LE which i used for OEM setup

is take it the driver package is missing then?

4

It's not preinstalled on OpenWrt, as bluez is rather heavy and 'useless' on a router (without configuration). Installing bluez-daemon bluez-utils bluez-utils-extra might already be enough, depending on your buetooth chipset (some need additional firmwares, my map-ac2200 does not).

5

i will give it a try and see if it works but i doubt i will ever have a use case for it, just will be cool to see if it works.

What about the original question of beamforming and MU-MIMO?

6

Those should just work.

7

oh ok nice :smiley:

im kinda just asking the questions i have about stuff rn sooo here's another one to add

since im running a snapshot (r21965-6f89a0ca20) sysupgrade has been added with the ability to flash stock firmware sooo my question is how do i update the snapshot if i do a sysupgrade will it flash the other parrtition?

since i cant really add new kmods as there is a kernel version mismatch

8

@DJMalachite, looks like the Bluetooth is a CSR8811 connected via serial TTY1. Unfortunatelly this serial port wasn't added to the dts file.

We should add this port to the dts file, example:

We may also need this:

but without the enable-gpios property or a different GPIO pin number.

From the "Linksys WHW03 V2" commit support:

Bluetooth:

  • Fully working with the following caveats:
    • RFKILL need to be enabled in the kernel.
    • An older version of bluez is needed as bccmd is needed to configure the chip.]
1 Like
9

@danitool Nice!

So it can be added just doest have much use?