Hello,
I plan to purchase a router for running LEDE, my main concern is the CPU power and the WIFI stablity (especially the 5G ).
I want to know which one is better?
R7500V2 seems to have mu-mimo but it is not avaialbe after running LEDE at the moment. But qualcomm seems to have better open-souce support? (Like the WNDR 3800 Athero chip).
And WRT1200, many people are using it.
Thanks.
The R7500 has a Quantenna radio. There's no support for that. Also, don't let Qualcomm's marketing tricks fool you - the ath10k driver is nothing like ath9k when it comes to openness.
Thanks a lot for the advice.
I will go for WRT1200.
Well... If it's Linksys you're referring to, then better get an ath10k device. They're both closed, but the Atheros driver seems to see more development and the community seems more involved than with Marvell.
If you want an open source driver, look at mt76 stuff, but that's two-stream max.
Just as a clarification, all the three drivers Borromini mentioned are indeed free drivers (in the kernel's sense of the word, namely GPLv2). What differentiates them however is the (in all three cases required and non-free) firmware, which tends to be rather big (fullmac-like) for mwlwifi and ath10k, while it's a lot smaller and shallower for mt76, giving the kernel more influence on the device behaviour. The firmware is part of the problem for ath10k and mwlwifi, as it handles most of the wireless connection, meaning that any bugs (and at least ath10k has quite some firmware crashes, mwlwifi isn't said to be a shining star either) are unfixably in the binary blob, rather than within the accessible kernel domain.
Thanks a lot for the clarification.
Finally I end up using the old R6300v2 (overclocking to 1.1G) to run LEDE and WRT3200ACM as the AP. I have good performance and stable WIFI experience, and keep the MU-MIMO feature in WRT3200ACM.