I moved from OpenWRT 15.05.01 to LEDE stable. Since doing so I have (consistently) gained an additional 40-50Mbps download speed (when on wifi) according to testmy.net. Using router with ath9k driver. This is awesome!
On which device did you see the improvement?
old tp-link wdr4300v1. I've also tested a wrt1900acsv2 but I didn't notice improvement in speed (although so far its reliability has been improved. It's no longer slowing to crawl like it used to).
LEDE release contains changes from Make Wifi Fast project of Bufferbloat team, this affects atheros-based wifi only, and gives better wifi performance, especially on ath9k driver.
See a news page about it: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Getting-Make-WiFi-Fast
Hi, is that means there will be MU-MIMO support for atheros-based wifi as decribed in the link?
That Phoronix link mentions FQ_codel for the ath10k driver. everything I've heard says that the ath10k driver is just as crappy as Linksys's marvell mwlwifi driver. I can't find much at all that's running the mt76 driver. Absent finding a mt76 board, is ath10k the way to go? The wrt1900acs wifi is a poor performer and I don't see myself buying anymore Linksys WRT unless they let the the community's developers hack on it and fix it.
the ath9k used to be the best supported driver, but over the last year the
ath10k has gotten a lot of attention and is considered pretty good at this
point.
David Lang
[quote="okji, post:6, topic:1855, full:true"]That Phoronix link mentions FQ_codel for the ath10k driver. everything I've heard says that the ath10k driver is just as crappy as Linksys's marvell mwlwifi driver. [/quote]ath10k relies on a firmware blob so it's not as easily hackable as ath9k, but so far it is imho the best open wifi ac driver.
LEDE uses the latest firmware blobs that are confirmed working well for these devices (they get updated every few months by qualcomm) and there are projects that work on improving that driver as said above.
It's not just the wifi imo. I typically saw pings in the 35 ms before upgrading to reboot. I now get pings in the 30 ms range instead. Only significant config change is using cake/layer cake instead of sfq/simple QoS now. I can't confirm better 5 Ghz performance since I haven't been able to get those radios to work yet. 
All things considered, reboot is a SOLID upgrade over its predecessor and LIGHT YEARS ahead of stock firmware.
LEDE is definitely better than any stock firmware out there. But that isn't saying a lot. Stock firmware routinely sucks. I sure would like to see the mt76 driver become more prevalent because relying on manufacturers to update closed blobs is not the answer for router performance and reliability going forward.
It amazes me how manufacturers continue to rely on a broken model. The manufacturer that lets LEDE devs improve the driver is going to generate more sales because the performance of their router will be better than the competition.
Does this affect the ath9k-htc driver for usb devices?
Quick question. I own WR1043NDv4 and in /etc/config/wireless I have this:
option path 'platform/qca956x_wmac'
So do I use ath9k driver or not?
Yes.
If in doubt, use ls /sys/class/net/wlanX/device/driver -la