Sadly it appears the support and development for the mwlwifi driver has unofficially officially stopped.
This is sad, as there were a number of siginificant bugs (particularly around DFS, radar detection) and feature misses (MU-MIMO) which were all 'promised' by the developer over the last couple of years. I know the politics of this are somewhat murky, with a supposed lack of backup from Marvell and Linksys. No hard feelings.
That said, I'm looking to switch router/AP combo to something more robust and feature complete.
Is there a consensus on the 'top 3' (just for fun) router/AP OpenWRT compatible hardware platforms that have:
Full hostapd compatible opensource driver support for the WiFi hardware (or failing that, a stable, feature complete and well maintained closed-source unix driver) including MU-MIMO support.
Multi-antenna, multi-radio hardware 2x2 or ideally 3x3.
I think perhaps the glory days of the high end 'all in one' are over. The Omnia looks promising but supply is limited and to get one in the UK is nearly £300.
I've decided to take a different approach, I'm going to convert an old Intel micro-PC into a dedicated Router for routing, vpn and SQM duties and invest in some of the Ubiquiti UniFi products.
I can get a Managed PoE switch and two UniFi AC access points for less than the cost of the Omnia and ultimately this will give me a much more robust setup. I'll probably run these on stock firmwares in all honesty, as the Ubiquity stuff gets pretty good reviews.
Keeps me in the OpenWRT community and will hopefully improve WiFi performance too.
Can somebody explain to me what NXP gains with this acquisition of Marvell's wireless assets? It seems like NXP is buying a hollowed-out shell given that Marvell has stopped development and probably laid off much of their wireless R&D staff while this acquisition has been going through regulatory oversight..
They're probably just out to bolster their IP (intellectual property) portfolio. In the last two years or so, the three big players – Broadcom, Qualcomm, NXP – have been trying to buy each other out (unsuccessfully). So NXP is just trying to be competitive. If you can't compete with your current portfolio, just buy someone else's.
Marvell still has a bunch of IP for their "disruptive" 802.11ax SoCs & Bluetooth[1].
I'd still avoid Marvell, and now NXP, for radio SoCs in Linux. Whilst the hardware in paper is great, historically, Marvell's wireless drivers are terribad. NXP will just grandfather in the less-than-stellar current driver developers (and their management team) who have no will to upstream drivers or explain why they code something the way it is – further exacerbated by their lack of documentation or willingness to share it.
For me, Marvell (and now NXP) is in the same group as Broadcom. Just avoid their wireless SoCs for now, and watch from a distance.
However, Marvell's CPUs and switches have been great in price/perf and support for open source. I wish their wireless business unit had the same motivation to support OSS as when the networking business unit upstreamed the DSA subsystem, becoming the current standard interface for Linux switch drivers.