Not really, plus you are conflating things. I never had an issue with WLAN cutting out on the rango back when I used the radios on the device. I am not talking about cessation of development, CC, WPA3 or any of the myriad of issues.
There are quite a number of voices saying they have no cutout issue with 19.x, but experience issue with 21.x.RC, so backup to version 19.x where things work. At any rate, for those that have the issue on 21.x.RC / master and might want to try the previous FW, you could try:
prev88W8964FW.sh
wifi down
cd /lib/firmware/mwlwifi
mv 88W8964.bin 88W8964.bin.ORG
#### 88W8964 firmware 9.3.2.6 -- 11896425a9fe6d576b52864d8d0945656db3d551
wget https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/raw/11896425a/bin/firmware/88W8964.bin -O 88W8964.bin.TST
ln -s 88W8964.bin.TST 88W8964.bin
## for back to original
## rm 88W8964.bin && ln -s 88W8964.bin.ORG 88W8964.bin
wifi up
to see if it changes anything.
On setting the CC, there was a patch (I still have ti here), plus CC with the third radio was a well known issue, and resolvable if dealt with correctly, at least it WFM on a NA(CA) unit.
Looking back at the original issue 378 on the mwlwifi github when the OEM BLOB was being extracted and tested, eventually there are people reporting the intermittent wifi issue and backing out to the, then current, previous BLOB. Appears to be possibly client related.
So choice appears to be the more performant BLOB if no issue, otherwise go back to previous. Seems simple enough for those with the issue to use something like the above; problem is awareness I guess.
To offer an easy way to test things I have put up an image that has both BLOBs included, with the link upon installation pointing at the previous 9.3.2.6 BLOB, you can change the link to the current 9.2.2.12 BLOB to test things.
Just the image as I run things here, master with today's 5.10.51 kernel push, r17161-853e8465a7.51051BLOB in my drop.
I pushed a PR to openwrt-21.02 trunk to downgrade the firmware to 9.3.2.6. Affected devices are Linksys WRT3200ACM & WRT32X. It'd be really helpful to get the PR merged if more people can confirm 9.3.2.6 solves the Wi-Fi cut-out issue.
I’m not sure. This was intended to be a hotfix to be shipped with 21.02 stable release until actual fixes on the trunk are backported to the 21.02 branch. I think it will be better to just backport those instead of downgrading the firmware. I’m working on submitting a patch for it.
Some people seems to be having issues after upgrading to 21.02.0, so I decided to grab the older drivers from 19.07, and make packages to install them on 21.02.0-rc4; this is obviously not a long term solution, but I hope it might be useful to debug the issue.
just be aware that the mlwifi has similar noticably reduced TX power issues, if you carelessly modify the country code via LuCi at all (avoid that) or if you activate radio 2 and do not manually configure country code on command line afterwards.
@eduperez I have some questions (pardon my ignorance!, and I haven’t used your files yet):
(I have a WRT1200AC ver1, and a ver2 unit)
Do you have to use your provided firmware files (mwlwifi-firmware-...ipk) with your drivers (kmod-mwlwifi_...ipk)? Or, is it possible to mix and match either one of these with what is provided with official OpenWRT releases to see what works best?
If they do need to be installed together, do they have to be installed in one (the same) opkg command?
(BTW, it may be helpful to put the answers to #1 & #2 in your README.md file)
As far as I can see, it appears as though there will be no further driver/firmware development (both official and unofficial) for these units. True? And if so, do you think this means that as OpenWRT continues developing that we may see more and more unfixable problems arise with these units in the (near) future?
Thanks so much for your help and timely compiles!!!!
Not all drivers are compatible with all firmwares, you might end with a router that does not boot. In the past, when it made sense to test different combinations, I published specific packages. Besides, the firmware has not been modified for a long time. So, no, do not try it.
Yes, install both of them on the same command, it's safer.
Yes, all development is stalled. The drivers could be developed, for example to support newer kernels, but the firmware is closed source and a dead end.
The "mwifiex" drivers only drive the third radio on the WRT3200ACM, and it is usually disabled because it has a very small antenna, and causes conflicts with the drivers for the other two radios.
The Linksys WRT1200AC is sadly (I mean, I bought one of my two units only 3 years ago) end of life/abandoned and explained why in this post, and if you go to the official website and see that the latest firmware is at least 33 months old. Since arguably your router/firewall is your first and best line of defense against hackers/malware, this is, understating it: a non-ideal place to be at. A great thing about the open source community is having the possibility to keep older devices going.
However I think even using OpenWRT on these devices is essentially over…. Back in the v18 days, and LEDEv17 before that, everything worked great. On v19, with each consecutive release I’m having more and more WiFi problems. Version 19.07.8 is essentially unusable as my 5GHz radio won’t stay connected to any of my devices, heck even the 2GHz radio is flaky (and I don’t have an exotic configuration). On a whim, I tried v21.02.0 (which I see as of very recently is now the official release!) and it was worse, simply unusable.
/rant
Having said all that, I rolled back a release and am glad to report that your compiled files for 19.07.7 work very well (been using for 2 days)!! I seem to be not having 5GHz disconnects/drops and my Sonos (on 2GHz band) is much more responsive. So if you @eduperez can’t keep up with the official releases (I really like keeping my firmware up to date for security fixes), or can’t compile, or the aging driver is just not able to work with the newer OpenWRT code, I’ll have to sell off my units and look elsewhere (hint: it will NOT be another Linksys). Thank you @eduperez for all your work! But for me, the clock is ticking on getting rid of these units as I’m now relying on you to keep them going (no pressure :-).
In what way, maybe some specifics in the 21.x release thread may serve some useful purpose; I certainly find master to be very usable on a mamba and rango, but admittedly, I turned off the radios on the rango long time passing.
