NBG6515 (Zyxel) WLAN fails

For Developers
1

Dear all,

openWRT 19.07.3 successfully boots on this device (https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/zyxel/zyxel_nbg6515), and wired network interfaces work. However, I can't get wireless to work.

The system has

  • MT7620A
  • MT7530WU (switch)
  • MT7610EN (WiFi, probably 5 GHz)

I have tried several Ralink and Meditek driver combinations, none of them loads and I get messages like:

[   16.123407] mt76x0e 0000:01:00.0: card - bus=0x1, slot = 0x0 irq=4
[   16.136066] mt76x0e 0000:01:00.0: ASIC revision: 76100002
[   16.150378] mt76x0e 0000:01:00.0: Firmware Version: 0.1.00
[   16.255366] mt76x0e 0000:01:00.0: driver does not support default EEPROM
[   16.268868] mt76x0e: probe of 0000:01:00.0 failed with error -22
[   16.286996] kmodloader: done loading kernel modules from /etc/modules.d/*

or

[   10.067018] ieee80211 phy0: rt2x00lib_request_eeprom_file: Info - Loading EEPROM data from 'soc_wmac.eeprom'.
[   10.108375] rt2800_wmac 10180000.wmac: Direct firmware load for soc_wmac.eeprom failed with error -2
[   10.126603] rt2800_wmac 10180000.wmac: Falling back to sysfs fallback for: soc_wmac.eeprom
[   10.169829] urngd: jent-rng init failed, err: 2
[   10.242816] ieee80211 phy0: rt2x00lib_request_eeprom_file: Error - Failed to request EEPROM.
[   10.259766] rt2800_wmac: probe of 10180000.wmac failed with error -12
[   10.300568] kmodloader: done loading kernel modules from /etc/modules.d/*

Does anyone have an idea or seem something similar? I found some hints that this might be related to missing information that got lost during flashing; if so, I have only opened and changed a single device (of several same ones) and could also read out the original flash from a TFTP boot without flashing.

I have also been able to restore the original firmware since the ones at Zyxel are upgrade images that fail upon flashing.

Any help for a "newbie in enabling new devices" is highly appreciated.

2

Hi, i know that this is a pretty old topic by now but i've been playing with this device in the background since 2019. On paper it seemed like a pretty easy grab to practise on seeing how similar the hardware of this device is to the evaluation-board targets that exist.

After a couple months of mashing things together and trying to learn device-trees i finally got the 5GHz chip to stop complaining about missing eeprom data. The thing now boot's and i thought i'd share it somewhere.

Do you know anyone on the dev team?

3

This is great! You could add that to the description here:
https://openwrt.org/toh/zyxel/zyxel_nbg6515_ac750

I have summed up what I got to work a while ago on this page. So far, I only got to work the 2.4 GHz. I did not bother putting anything better together since the image for the evaluation board does most of the job and the 2.4 GHz functionality can be preserved with part of the original firmware that needs to be preserved beforehand.

I would be happy to try your solution out - I have several of these devices (rescued from electronic waste).

4

from my point of view it wasn't that much work when i finally got the hang of it. i dumped the flash chip, then cut that up in pieces as you described on the device page, after that i basically just combed through the factory partition until it looked like the eeprom dumps people have posted at dd-wrt or some random github page. marked the offset and then added a tag in the device tree for the driver to find it.

&pcie0 {
	wifi@0,0 {
		reg = <0x0000 0 0 0 0>;
		mediatek,mtd-eeprom = <&factory 0x8000>;
		ieee80211-freq-limit = <5000000 6000000>;
	};
};

was pretty much all there was to satisfy the failed check.

I actually made this account today just to post this and as far as i can tell, self-registration on the main site is disabled. Is there a topic on the forum for registrations or should i contact someone?

5

I apologize. Indeed there has been a change:

https://openwrt.org/register_yourself_in_the_wiki. It seems you will have to contact "tmomas" here on the forum in order to create a wiki account for you.

I am looking forward to trying this out. It seems that I missed the 5GHz part in the dump.