I am considering buying Netgear Nighthawk R7800
I want to know if I will likely be able to use wpa3 personal security for the wireless. Is it likely that I will be able to do that?
Is there anything else that will likely bring it to end of life in the foreseeable future (next 5 years)?
Qualcomm Atheros IPQ8065
2 cores @ 1700
128MB NAND
512MB RAM
WLAN hardware 2x Qualcomm Atheros QCA9984
WLAN 2.4 GHz b/g/n
WLAN 5.0 GHz a/n/ac
5 1 Gbit ethernet ports
2x USB 3.0
If price isn't a parameter, don't, it's old by today's standards.
It's not bad, just using outdated wifi tech.
Just answering the questions, but not commenting on the price/performance of that device:
Yes.
No. Current minimum requirements are 8MB flash / 64MB RAM. Next version will likely be 16/128. But you've got plenty of headroom.
My needs are very minimal. For the most part, one computer connected to an Ethernet port + guest network for 1 security camera. An occasional second computer on wifi. I guess it would be nice to run a VPN client on the router but I would not want to route all of my traffic through the VPN.
I guess I am in "mess around"/ "not wanting to care too much about bricking the device" mode. I also might give up on the open firmware if it starts to look complicated.
Edit: I forgot that I also have a VOIP adapter that I will connect.
Edit: hmm.. maybe not such a good device for a beginner, actually. So, your advice "don't" is good advice.
There are some models, which have broken NANDs. when flashing the Kernel, some (mostly one) blocks are skipped. As a result, the start of the root-partition (called “ubi” in this model) comes later.
Result: Bootloop of the device
What you can do is here, edit the file target/linux/ipq806x/files-x.x/arch/arm/boot/dts/qcom-ipq8065-r7800.dts and put the startAddress for “ubi” up. (&nand_controller -→ nand@0 -→ partitions -→ ubi@1880000), currently(04.2020) at line 360 )
Edit the two numbers showing 1880000 to 18A0000. (skip 2 blocks)
Then compile the image using make.
There already is. The ipq8065 has two nss cores that arent supported by vanilla openwrt builds and now duo to DSA never will be anymore. I just said goobye to my ipq8064 devices (which i've used for many years) for this reason. nss cores and dsa are incompatibel, and always will be (as has been explained to me on this forum).
Ipq806* users are now dependant on the avaibility of custom swconfig based firmware builds that have the closed source nss drivers. Not really futureproof if you ask me.
If you want something futureproof, try and get a mediatek soc based device. Mediatek has been very opensource friendly, as has been repeatedly mentioned by openwrt devs. So their hardware is really good supported and needs no custom fw or nasty kernel hacks for all features of their socs to be fully implemented. MT7621AT devices for me where good enough, you can go filelogic 830 if you need more power.
I think I should just start a new thread and list out my specifications.
This is a good point. Thanks for raising it.
With that in mind, I'm still not sure that the device would be dropped from supported status for quite some time, but it is clear that running standard OpenWrt builds will result in a significantly suboptimal experience from a performance perspective.
The bad blocks are very rare on an R7800 but are seen a bit more on the XR500 (which is an R7800 derivative)
My faithful R7800 is still my main router which runs fine without the NSS cores for my 600 Mb ISP connection.
The wireless range is very good and I have an SSID with WPA3 for my new stuff and an SSID with WPA2 for older /IoT stuff
I have Adblock and https-dns-proxy installed and if you want VPN then WireGuard also runs fine and will get you around 300 Mb/s throughput
So yes it is still a very good router and will probably supported for the coming years also because it is still very much in use.
But it is not state of the art, I recently bought a GLi.NET MT-6000 for E 100 which might be my next main router 
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