There are some great discussions going on around the GL-MT6000 in various threads I have linked below. However, it should be beneficial to have a thread more specific to those who are a bit more Snapshot savvy and are willing to try things/updates that tend to be more experimental* / bleeding-edge*.
That said, comments/suggestions in this thread should not be mistaken as being "average user" safe and stable. There be dragons in this thread.
Links to existing GL-MT6000 discussions:
* Disclaimer
If you run Snapshot/experimental builds, you have to accept that stability may be compromised. Don't run Snapshot/experimental builds if your goal is to be hands-off with your MT6000.
To clarify my risk statement, a new firmware may have newly introduced bugs. "Risky" in the sense that there is some level of unknown stability until tested.
I downloaded and am running the latest MediaTek firmware on stock 23.05.3 with no obvious problems or improvements. I should've ran some slightly in-depth tests before and after. Lazy...
Thanks for the pointers about kmod-mt7986-firmware and simply overwriting it's installed files. I guess you keep that package installed even with the incorrect files copied over?
From my perspective, yes, I just leave the kmod-mt7986-firmware and mt7986-wo-firmware packages selected in my build. But I put the latest firmware I want to run into my build via files/lib/firmware/mediatek/:
user@6a61cecfb182:~/openwrt$ ls -lah files/lib/firmware/mediatek/
total 7.2M
drwxr-xr-x 2 user user 4.0K May 9 13:38 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 user user 4.0K May 9 13:38 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 13K May 9 13:38 mt7986_rom_patch.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 13K May 9 13:38 mt7986_rom_patch_mt7975.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 511K May 9 13:38 mt7986_wa.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 2.2M May 9 13:38 mt7986_wm.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 2.2M May 9 13:38 mt7986_wm_mt7975.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 2.4M May 9 13:38 mt7986_wo_0.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 2.4M May 9 13:38 mt7986_wo_1.bin
In this way, the firmware I choose to run overrides the included firmware from the packages listed above.
@_FailSafe is there an improvement when using the new mt firmware ?
How do you download them ? I get a 5kb file for mt7986_rom_patch. Current file is about 13kb ?
Yeah, it's tricky to get the files downloaded without pulling the HTML content instead of the binary content.
Here's a little script I threw together for this. It will download the .tgz file containing the firmware and then extract just the mt7986 .bin files that are needed to place into the /lib/firmware/mediatek/ directory on your MT6000 (or to include in your build via files/lib/firmware/mediatek/). Just download this script and chmod +x it to execute.
Given the commit hash I posted here, usage of this script would look like this:
The script will create a new directory in your PWD named mt7986-firmware and that's where the mt7986 binaries will land after downloaded and extracted. Copy or move them from that location to wherever you need based on your use-case.
Now that I think about it... is there any way to verify file integrity from that mediatek site? Just download it a few times and compare checksums? That seems kinda mean to mediatek's bandwidth though...
Good call on driving into this path more directly. I just pushed an updated v2 of the get-mt7986-fw.sh script and it uses this URL instead now. Saves multiple megabytes of download.
Not seeing a direct way to do that at the moment, but I'll keep digging to see if an idea pops up.
You may already be aware of this, but if you use WED, you will want to make sure to grab 7 total files which include:
@_FailSafe I already built and flashed the latest snapshot ( r26280 ). How do I get to show the md5sums of these ? Files look exactly ( log and dir) as shown on @Jack007 post.
I must clarify, I didn't use your script but downloaded them from the link above provided by Nullity.
Regarding file verification, you can git clone https://git01.mediatek.com/openwrt/feeds/mtk-openwrt-feeds, which is ~130MB. Git includes file integrity verification.
The md5sums I posted above matched the git repository. Here's all of them.
Paste the md5sums I posted into a file on the router, then "cd" to the /lib/firmware/mediatek directory and run md5sum -c FILE, for example md5sum -c /root/firmware.md5sum.
or run md5sum /lib/firmware/mediatek/* then compare the numbers.
Of course, it has some risk, but it's nothing one can't revert back from if needed.
