I see a bunch of topics conserning devices with MT7628 at its heart in development forum.
So, the question: what's the current status of MT7628 support in OpenWRT?
I've got small GL.iNet Mango (MT300N-V2) wireless router and in doubts whether OpenWRT supports on-chip DSA, HW-offloading and HW crypro enhancer? As far as I can see, there's no crypro engine support in configuration still, is there? (Despite work mentioned on the forum.) And what's about DSA and offloading?
And if something is not supported in OpenWRT at the moment, is it supported in OEM firmware?
The chip is not that Hi-end, of course. But it is meant to be improvement over MT7620. So, how is it actually when combined with software support? MT7620, for example, benefits substantially from HW-offloading.
In 2023, and considering the prices for mt7621a based alternatives, mt7628 should not be on your wish list. The rt2x00 based 2.4 SOC internal wireless alone makes it unattractive, before even looking at the slower single-core CPU (and the typically low flash/ RAM sizes).
That doesn't mean you can't use it, if you already own it - but then you'd already know what to expect (and what not).
No new upstream driver, so I don't think there is any change, also looking at those threads mostly stopped discussion about it for long, probably no one is interested to continue the work.
OEM supports or not, you can ask GL-INET, or you can try to go back to stock and test, however since their UI is simplified one, I doubt they will let you make those changes from UI even the core has support.
I don't know which country you are in, but I am in doubt with this price difference statement. In my country, the Mango is only half price when compared to my
Netgear WAX206 (and previously when it was on sale, it's only 20% more expensive than Mango), while the WAX206 has MT7622 which is a lot better in terms of performance, not to mention that it has 802.11AX & 2.5G WAN port.
GL.iNet is OpenWRT-based, isn't it? Has it ssh access? Will find out.
Well, I have searched something more decent, but couldn't find. (WAX206 among these) I'm in provincial Russia. Used or new. May be I'm not good enough in searching skills.
And GL.iNet' products are accessible here via Chinese AliExpress. (For less than $25.)
Just to be correct: MT7628 got a MediaTek-designed 2.4 GHz 802.11bgn similar to MT7603, unlike the older MT7620 SoC which got rt2x00 for Wi-Fi.
The big downside of the MT7628 is the lack of Gigabit Ethernet. And while an upstream Ethernet driver exists, there is still only a draft-quality driver for the switch not supporting most of it's features:
That's why in OpenWrt we are still using swconfig and the pre-upstream Ethernet driver with that SoC, and that would have to be sorted out first before we could try to support NAT and PPPoE offloading.
No idea about the crypto engine, probably some EIP97-like device.
Well, as far as I can see, the problem with mt7628 is that it is low-end now, while formally it is improvement over mt7620 in many aspects, the latter was not that "low-end" for its time. So, the lack of interest for developers. Although there obviously are many niches where mt7628 could be a quite adequate choice.
The unfinished work is.....5yrs ago....I wouldn't expect anything, I have a Buffalo WCR-1166DS which uses the same chipset and I will use it as cheap AP only, not gonna do much with it.
Yeah.....and you know the MT7628 was announced in 2014, which is almost 10 yrs ago? Technology is changing fast, even the above mentioned MT7621 was in the same period and already being considered as low end now.
Yes it's modified from OpenWrt, however unlike official OpenWrt it can use any ugly patch, and/or proprietary driver, and of course SSH is possible.
DSA post is 4.5yrs old also. Not much hope, but still…
No heavy usage intended here also. Just curious, if OEM would be better performing than OpenWRT. Luckily GL.iNET's OEM firmware is not too old, September 2023.
By the way, the device is in the list (ToH) of “ideal” among 13 other devices with MT7628. (It has 16MiB/128MiB flash/RAM and OpenWRT successfully compiles for these targets.)
It could give some confusion. (Unfortunately no mentioning of not working DSA, offloading and of course HW-encryption.)
For me, the mt7628 sub-target will never receive DSA support due to lack of effort. I think that in a few years the whole subtarget will be dropped.
Remember that most MT7628 devices do not meet the newly established requirements (16M/128M). So, the mt7628 destiny is the same as old ar71xx devices in ath79 transition.
I agree with @slh's opinion, consider buying at least an mt7621 based router or a qca83x7 switch based router.
Although there obviously are many niches where mt7628 could be a quite adequate choice.