Sitecom WLR-7100 development/progress

I have installed the snapshot on two WLR-7100 routers. Although they only have 64MB RAM they do work well, even with Luci installed.

Is there any way I can test or support this device to become member of the stable version(s)? Who are working on this device?

(Moved to the For Developers section.)

I'm not 100% sure of how this works in OpenWRT, but AFAICS support for this device is merged in master, but not part of any release yet because it was merged after the 19.07 release branch was made. Since AFAICS only bugfixes are backported to existing releases, no new features, I think 19.07 will never support this device.

However, I think there's nothing needed to be done to get this device into a stable release than wait: As soon as the next stable release branch is created from master, it will support this device automatically.

Good to hear that the snapshot is working for you on this device. I recently got a WLR-7100 (v1 001) myself and am planning to run OpenWRT on it (but I started with adding a bit documentation to the wiki page about the device and stock firmware).

Which version of the WLR-7100 do you have?

Related to this device: I noticed the techdata page lists the AR8327N as the ethernet switch. However, my device (v1 001) has an AR8337N, which is also listed on the device page. I wonder if this is a typo, or if there are different variants of this device with different switches? @tmomas, it seems you added this to the techdata page, do you still have this device? Could you doublecheck it?

I don't own this device, I just created the dataentry (I assume I did it, since the records do not go as far back). Probably the info about the switch used comes from wikidevi: https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/Sitecom_WLR-7100

The git commit which added support for this device however states QCA8337.

Based on the git commit, I have now corrected the switch of WLR7100 v1 001.

@tmomas Sounds good, thanks!

Hi, I clarified few things in hwdata page and device page.
@tmomas could You remove "v1 002" from "Techdata: Sitecom WLR-7100 v1 002" in hwdata page?

@matthijs it seems that the variants are simply production batches, as I don't see any difference from the photo https://openwrt.org/_media/media/sitecom/wlr7100/wlr7100-v1-002_pcb.png compared to my v1 002. The only thing i could not compare is the SPI chip which is on the other side of the board. Mine is MXIC MX 25L6406E.

I have both versions, but the V1.001 is in operation in heavily used environment and needs some timing to get removed to get a picture of the PCB. Would it be helpful to do this?

That's not necessary, it was only to satisfy curiosity or more like completeness of information we can deduce, without contacting vendor. OpenWrt image works on both variants so we can ignore the differences.

Can you please re-add everything that you have deleted?

What's the reason for keeping the fields or setting them explicitly to -? And if there is one, shouldn't those be set - by default, when setting up new hwdata page?

Right, that also seems to be confirmed by this commit: https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=474aa3237c1bac86b475c3b2955e9501353a87f5

Seems I have the same one.

I also added a picture of the PCB back to the device page (should have done that right away when I had daylight, now had to fiddle with lighthing, but it worked).

Setting them explicitly to "-" is a sign that someone thoughtfully and deliberately set the fields to this value. Contrary to this, an empty datafield could have just been forgotten.

The dataentry in question is not new and existed already.

I wasn't asking about already present pages, I was asking about new ones. Someone could simply omit those fields, by thinking "it's not present on my device".

Thank you all for helping improve the OpenWRT experience on the WLR-7100 router.

Today I updated a WLR-7100 v1.002 to the latest snapshot (flashed with default settings) I experienced a max download of about 10Mbps on the 5GHz radio, default setting. Upload is as expected around 100Mbps (my max ISP upload). Luci is installed.

This behaviour is on iOS (iPhone SE 2016) and PadOS (iPad Pro 10.5) and windows 10 (Dell with Intel WiFi chipset).

Could this be caused by a Atheros (Ath10k) driver/firmware issue? Or am I missing another thing in this router?

Any ideas?

Hi matthijs,

Do you have this router? I experience poor download speed on the 5GHz radio. It drops to 6Mbps on 20MHz when connected. Upload is as expected. V1.002 is the one I have.

I think it is driver related, but I'm not experience enough to try and test different drivers, firmware and settings for the 9882(x) radio.

Can you check yours if you have one?

I have two of them running, but I have just put them up and did not really test performance. I also used the same SSID for both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, so I didn't really test them separately.

I'll see if I can find a moment to test this when I'm near these routers again (might be a week or two), to see if mine also has limited performance on 5Ghz.

Thanks. Looking forward to your results!

BTW, this behavior does occur in SNAPSHOTS from about December to today.

I did a quick test today. On 5Ghz, the link speed stuck to 80-90Mbps, but the actual speed of an HTTP download was about 80-160kByte/s, so not really great. Looking at a wireshark dump I saw that there was some downlink packet loss (one in 20/30 packets or so), so that probably limited the downlink speed by limiting the TCP window.

I did another test on 2.4Ghz, which stuck to 54Mbps link speed, but the actual download speed was still only 200-300kByte/s.

I do have some other problems with link speed on this particular laptop though, so I'm not sure if this was a super representative test...

Thanks matthijs,

I tested the current SNAPSHOT today and the speed of the AC radio has improved. But not as it should.

However, there is an issue with throughput of the WAN-LAN ethernet speeds. It is not going above 2-4 Mbps. So there is an issue in the switch driver or in the chipset dirver itself? I'm not "qualified" to judge... :wink:

Is there anyone in this thread reading along to verify what's going on with this Sitecom Router? I have three WLR-8100 routers running smoothly, but this little brother is crippled since a couple of months.

Cheers,

Cc: @matthijs
In my tests the WiFi throughput was realistic (download tested only), on 2,4GHz:
laptop with AR9382: 3,42 MB/s (rather on the low side)
Xiaomi A1: 4,26 MB/s
on 5GHz:
laptop with AR9382: 8,92 MB/s
Xiaomi A1: 21,9 MB/s

The wired WAN to LAN download speed was around 22 MB/s. When I used "iperf3 -P4" with laptop and pc connected to each zone, the throughput was around 160 Mbit/s, with flow_offloading enabled the speed jumped to 193 Mbit/s. This is rather low for such device, I would expect 150 Mbit/s more. Looks more like the connection between CPU and switch is limited to 100 Mbit/s full-duplex, but I did compare switch registers with original firmware and those are exactly the same.
I'll try to redo the tests in upcoming days and check if I did something wrong.

@musashino Hi, You committed support for I-O DATA WN-AG300DGR router and it appears very similar to WLR-7100. Could You test the wired speed (WAN to LAN) with "iperf3 -P4" on latest OpenWrt snapshot? Thanks.