Thanks for your hard work, hopefully someone will carry on the effort.
Also hopefully at some point 18.x will be stable and feature rich enough for our chipset so custom builds won't be required.
Could you please put the checksums as well?
Forgot to upload the checksums file. It is there now. Thanks for reporting.
There is also the possibility to use the closed source drivers from the mtk-openwrt-feed. Could not get them to work but I also did not have the time at the time to get them to work.
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I never understood what are those drivers, is he working with MTK or something, or just some reverse engineered experiment.
He works at Mediatek and provides a way to use the closed source mtk drivers in OpenWRT. Kinda cool imho!
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selling mine too, good hardware but no support at all, only your builds kept it alive, if you wont continue no reason for me to keep it too, 18.06.1 is as bad as olders, no 2.4Ghz and limited 5Ghz to only 20dbm, its too much for me to keep it. I am Going to buy a new one with better openwrt support., thinking to buy an Linksys EA-8500,powerfull with good support! Dir 860L is juseless to be kept with the ancient factory firmware (3years old) !
I've bought 2 Xiaomi MIR3G so I will continue producing builds. I can still release DIR-860L builds if people want them but they will be not tested on it. Also, there are always the buildbot builds, which are fine for 99% of people. From what I have read the 20 dBm thing is purely cosmetic. Your antennae could be the problem. Fun weekend project, messing around with those.
When time permits me to do so I have the following plans:
- Provide a stable (18.06.x) and an experimental build (trunk)
- Get the closed source MTK drivers provided by Nossiac working and see how they compare to the mt76 driver
- Self-updating RBL blocklists (however @dibdot has a new project, banIP, which provide those)
Always open to new suggestions/ideas
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have an 868L (DDwrt) which is identical to 860Lbut it hasnt any of 860L`s issues and its signal its much better (30dbm) even from routers with external antennas,like archer c7 v1 thats why i think that drivers are the problem with 860L. if 2.4 Ghz fixed and 5Ghz allowed to reach 30dbm then it will also become a good router.
868L is a Broadcom platform and has a completely different SOC and WiFi chips.
If you continue your build of DIR-860L, I would like to help testing.
Right now, I am using my TP-Link Archer C7 v2 as main router. Once there's a solid DIR-860L build, I plan transferring to the later in the end.
i know i mentioned it because of the antenna, it has same antennas as 860L, anyway, finally i gave up with 860L and bought an EA-8500, which seems working great, still having 860L just in case its problems will be fixed!
except the fewer lan ports and external antennas on the xiaomis are there any other differences with the dlink ?
I'm leaning towards building a x86 pfsense router, gigabit switch and hook any ac router as AP to the switch.
Aside from the obvious (number of LAN ports), the main difference is mt7602e (DIR-860L) vs mt7603e (mir3g) wlan for the 2.4 GHz band. The newer mt7603e should be a bit better at coping with interference than mt7602e, but their current state (driver side, potentially also hardware side) isn't perfect yet, if you're looking for an AP and 2.4 GHz reliability/ performance (5 GHz is supposed to be a bit better, and be it just because of less interference to be expected there), a different SOC (e.g. ipq40xx) might be a better option.
@Bartvz
Please continue with your optimized builds for the DIR-860L. I own a few of this devices and i'm happy to test future builds and provide feedback.
I'm using them only as smart switches + AP's but i'm pretty sure they also do a good job as main routers.
There was an update to the mt76 driver so I compiled a new trunk build, r7944. This build is untested on hardware since I don't own any at this moment. Flash at your own risk! Download links are here.
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Is there anything special to get back to the original firmware from d-link to test something or I can just flash the latest fw via luci ?
I would do a reset of OpenWRT then flash the D-Link firmware via bootloader recovery.
Uh, what is wrong with you mate, here are couple of points you are not correct:
- @Bartvz did all the work voluntarily !
- He is not writing the code, he is cherry-picking and building the fw, so any bugs are done by the developers (which again (usually) aren't paid for what they do in the open-source world)
- Nobody made you install this fw to your router, why didn't you stick to the official one?
- It works for most people (anyway as good as or better than the official openwrt builds)
So, why are you disrespectful and ungrateful ?
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Instead of letting your anger explode into this thread why not provide constructive criticism? Posts like yours do no make the "problem" better. Except maybe for you, because you can vent some of your anger. If you want these problems with the 2.4 GHz WiFi and USB3 fixed tell me about it and ask if other people have the same experience as you do. Then, together, we can look into fixing them if that is within our reach or contact a developer about it. That is constructive and will make things better. OpenWRT uses open source drivers which are not feature complete but do run on newer versions of the Linux kernel with newer packages. Padavan and consorts use the closed source drivers and therefore are relegated to an outdated version of the Linux kernel and older packages. Pick your poison.
As stated in the OP: "There be dragons here!" However, over time, on a bumpy road, the dragons will shrink or even vanish due to developers chipping away at them in their free time. That is how open source projects work. An idea would be to do a crowdfunding action where we would hire NBD aka Felix Fietkau to work on the mt76 driver for a week. That might speed up things a bit. What do you guys think?
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Hi labrok,
I saw you have a 868L. Dou you also use the openwrt on it ?
Is it rev A or B ?
kr,
Frank
I'm up for this idea! 
But to be honest i don't even have much problems with my DIR-860L at the moment. It's running stable and the Wifi performance is okay for me.