Doesn't the Ath10K require closed firmware blob as well? Are Ath10K and mwlwifi THAT different with respect to openness. Neither has the openess of Ath9K.
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[quote="okji, post:43, topic:80"]
Doesn't the Ath10K require closed firmware blob as well? Are Ath10K and mwlwifi THAT different with respect to openness. Neither has the openess of Ath9K.
[/quote]yep, ath10k includes a firmware blob as well. Neither is as fully open as ath9k.
But to my knowledge ath10k driver itself is being developed more openly by the community (in https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/kvalo/ath.git/ ) than the mwlwifi driver that seems to be developed by a few guys at Marvell. At least that is my impression from the commits in https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/commits/master
Anybody think it is a good idea to avoid buying Ath10K and mwlwifi devices for now considering Ath9K is all that is going to receive support from the make-wifi fast initiative? I've had nothing but solid Ath9K performance and I'm wondering if there's anything to be gained by moving to Ath10K or mwlwifi if Ath9K is only going to improve in performance.
Ath9k is 802.1an only of course... If you want 802.11ac, Mediatek with mt76 is the most open 802.11ac hardware/driver combination around. There a few Mediatek devices that work nicely. I have an AC1300 D-Link DIR-860L rev B1 myself, e.g.
Seconded + it is cheap too! Bought mine for €55,- which imho is a bargain.
https://github.com/chunkeey/LEDE-IPQ40XX/commit/67ce86b5038124026cb25e23830ed43b7f97da41
https://wikidevi.com/wiki/ASUS_RT-AC58U
Looks like a fun device 
.> .. I have an AC1300 D-Link DIR-860L rev B1 myself, e.g.
@Borromini, Would you mind sharing a recent performance figure? I need a new router to replace my single core 400Mhz Buffalo as a VPN server. I found that my slow VPN speed is limited by the processor speed. Do you have any comment about its speed?
Thanks @diizzy
How fast is the mediatek CPU that is used in the dir-860l B1? What kind of LAN <-> WAN speeds is it able to get with traffic shaping (piece of cake) enabled? I am currently running a 200/40 Mbit internet connection and the Archer C7 I am using is showing a lack of CPU power in those cases.
@diizzy Are you able to test that? I only have 50/8.
No, I don't have it installed on my faster connections as it's pointless.
This is what I found. It seems to push almost a full gbps through NAT. Samba is fast too.
Running exactly what?
I'm wondering this myself. It's not a surprise that some devices with slower CPUs can get full or near full gigabit speed through NAT on the original firmware.
As he wrote the it was on OpenWRT.
I can confirm the above tests. Running iperf3 between a PC connected to the WAN side and another PC connected to the LAN side I can push gigabit (940+ Mbit/s) speeds in either direction. And it seems like this little monster has power left over while doing so. CPU idle % is at 42-47%, with sirq taking up the non-idle processing power. I recorded this cpu usage while running iperf for 2 minutes, as to get an accurate and settled in CPU usage reading.
Next, I repeated the same tests with SQM enabled on the WAN interface with a limit of 1 Gbit/s. Running cake, I was able to push 400 Mbit/s WAN -> LAN and 600 Mbit/s LAN -> WAN. Unfortunately, I ran into quite a few crashes while doing so. This is a known issue with cake running on mediatek SOCs.
Doing the same tests with fq_codel, everything was rock solid stable. What surprised me though, was that fq_codel was able to perform way better. It was pushing 700-800 Mbit/s WAN <-> LAN with little differences in either direction. I even tried to set SQM to 200 Mbit to confirm that it was actually working, and as expected, I was now only doing 200 Mbit/s, so the shaping was definitely working.
The bottom line is: I can very much recommend this little beast if you are interested in routing high-speed connections through LEDE without breaking the bank with 150-200 dollar routers.
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