You can't upgrade OpenWrt in that way. You will need a complete, self-consistent image if you want to change kernel modules.
Bulk upgrading of packages is not recommended and can lead to a soft-brick condition.
Thank you for the response. I have upgraded to 19.07 first. Actually, I have done it twice, first time using sysupgrade image and second time using TFTP and factory image. I explicitly told LuCI not to keep settings while doing an upgrade. For some reason, userdata was not erased properly, and some files like installed package info were remaining.
Your problem is then not of the class "Images for some device became too big to support a persistent overlay, causing such models to lose configuration after a reboot."
Did you analyze what does not work after installing?
Having been waiting for forever for a stable non-snapshot build for my TP-Link Archer A7 v5, I happily flashed my router today.
Incredibly easy to flash and configure. Best of all, because I used the same SSID and password, all my devices reconnected without issue.
Even better, the problem I had with 5GHz connections dropping randomly using the "official" firmware seems to have gone away entirely now that I'm using OpenWrt.
Next release candidate version rc2 was tagged yesterday and is being built by the buildbot right now. About 25% of the images have been built so far... The build will take 1-2 days, so the 19.07.0-rc2 announcement might come in a few days.
Looking forward to testing rc2. My EA6350v3 loses wifi after a couple days of growing memory use followed by automatic process killing. The unit is not particularly stressed - running as an AP with ~4 2.4G clients, ~2 5G clients and 2 wired clients. I captured a memory plot, syslog and kernel log here: 20191201 EA6350 v3 19-07 rc1 Memory-Crash Issues.odt
I've tried latest snapshot and have the same issue (actually started there, and dropped back to rc1 hoping it might resolve it).
Reinstalled RC2 on TP-LINK TD-W8970 flawlessly with the luci interface. So far, so good, 24 hours under moderate load without issues.
I would only recommend saving cascade.css of luci between reinstalls. I do not like the default bright colours. Btw. could I find somewhere a kind of dark mode for the luci interface?
@mk24 Follow-up on your suggestion. I tried removing the ct ath10k package (and kernel companion) and replacing with the non-ct 4019 versions. I let it run for the day and results are mixed. It hasn't crashed yet (EDIT: it crashed - the oom_reaper needed to start doing its thing overnight and dmesg logs show the wifi was disabled), but doesn't appear long before it will (EDIT: sure enough). Results are not good. Memory usage is still way too high for the load (~150MB). Connection times are so bad with the non ct packages that some devices gave up, and 5G speed and signal to noise are terrible. So the CT ath10k stuff has its advantages to be sure. Inexplicably, repetitive log message complaints about "Invalid legacy rate 26 peer stats" stopped about the same time memory usage dived back down to ~50MB (where I expect it should be for the the load) with no apparent reason. I don't have support legacy rates checked, but I've nothing so old it uses 802.11b in the house. Bottom line, sadly, I couldn't narrow the problem down to ath10k-ct by replacing it. Memory graphs and log extracts here if interested: 20191203 EA6350 v3 19.07 rc2 non-ct ath10k.odt