So I got the XR500. Now what do I do?

I saw that, and it made me wonder if there were any more you or others would add to that list...

Start small, you can always extend it as you go (yes, on snapshots that might involve having to update to a newer snapshot first, but that's not a biggy either).

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I've been running a snapshot on my XR500 for a few days now and I've been super happy with the performance and stability. I did have to change up the wireless driver (remove the outdated one and opkg install ath10k-firmware-qca9984), but overall it's been a great experience. Thanks again for your help @haakonpi and @phinn

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It seems like this router is supported officially in 22.03.0-rc6. Can you install OpenWRT straight from the OEM firmware, like you can on the R7800?

Yes. (It is a slightly tweaked almost identical sister to R7800, so pretty much all advice related to R7800 is also applicable to XR500)

The "factory" image should be flashable either from the Netgear OEM GUI or from the TFTP recovery routine.

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Perhaps I did something wrong, but uploading openwrt-22.03.0-rc6-ipq806x-generic-netgear_xr500-squashfs-factory.img from the OEM firmware seems to have bricked my XR500. Only the power light and ethernet cable lights are active. Attempting to access 192.168.1.1 over ethernet gives me an unable to connect error, and trying to connect via SSH yields the message ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.1 port 22: Network is unreachable. It also doesn't respond to pings. I tried restarting it a few times, to no avail. After flashing, I was able to access OpenWRT for a few seconds before losing connection to the router.

Would TFTP be my only option at this point?

Edit: Turning the device off and leaving it for half an hour before turning it back on seems to have fixed every problem, and the device is now functioning normally. I do not know why.

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@hnyman

Is it necessary for these messages to still be shown here:

I believe since this router is now officially supported, there should no longer be any warnings like this, or are these warnings still valid?

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Done, snapshot infobox removed.

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Does the XR500 OpenWrt firmware support 802.11s mesh?

Has anyone tried to get it to work? Iā€™m thinking of getting rid of the DumaOS. This would be a good reason for me to do it.

ath10k for QCA9984 does support 802.11s (same for ath10k and ath10k-ct).