Will there ever be support for this router? It seems a couple of people have asked before, but no definite answer was ever given, not even on the router's own page https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/asus/asus_srt-ac1900_a.
Before giving this explanation, let me state that I am not a very technical user, so if I get some details wrong, I apologize. Anyway, I looked into the technical details of this router, using the page I previously mentioned for it as a reference to see whether or not this router could be supported. Based and Flash MB and RAM alone, it seems possible, but then I looked into SoC support.
If I understand this page https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/hardware/soc correctly, then since the SRT-AC1900 uses a Qualcomm CPU, it cannot be supported, because Qualcomm processors use Ubicom IP Blocks, which are unsupported by Linux kernels (which, by extension, makes it incompatible with OpenWRT).
So, in conclusion, it seems to me that the Asus SRT-AC1900 is incompatible with OpenWRT. Is this correct?
Specification wise it shouldn't be too difficult to support the ASUS SRT-AC1900, it appears to be a bog standard ipq8064 SOC with two QCA9880-BR4A (ath10k) wlan cards (probably similar to the slightly newer ZyXEL NBG6817, bootloader/ firmwares on spi-nor, kernel+rootfs on eMMC). And yes, it should be fully supportable, those ubicom32 derived (NSS/ NPU) cores you're referring to are 'just' optional hardware accelerators for network offloading, they're only useful above 350-400 MBit/s WAN throughput and not required for normal operations below that (all ip806x devices are in the same boat regarding that situation). But in order to actually provide the device specific porting (DTS, etc.), someone with the hardware on the desk and a serial console needs to work on it (that someone could be you) and provide a patch. Given that all the hardware basics should be supported that might not be too difficult, but there could always be nasty surprises (e.g. if the vendor has applied signature verification for firmware upgrades or done something else in a non-standard way) - in the end no one knows, until it ends up on the desk of a developer (in the broadest sense of the word).
As usual in opensource there are no timeframes, chances are high that none of the official OpenWrt developers will 'ever' get such a device on their desk (if you care enough, you might be able to change that) - it's a small team and there is no budget to go around and buy every (or any) device from the shelves. Developers usually look into porting devices they get into their hands 'by accident' or which appear useful or merely interesting for their own/ personal needs. A large part of device ports are also contributed by external (often 'drive by') developers who care about their device and provide a pull request/ patch queue to get it supported in OpenWrt.
Yes, currently the ASUS SRT-AC1900 is not supported by OpenWrt, but there doesn't appear to be any fundamental reason that would rule out adding support for it. ipq806x is a pretty capable SOC family with a relatively good support status.
Hello, I have such device which for some reason doesnt work (was working and one day stopped). Unfortunately google support doesn’t provide it to me, tried recovery with google magic tools which also never ends.
So i have a device and ready to do something, but need instructions. Appreciate for guidance.
Hopefully i can at least retrieve certain valuable information which can make sense for someone.
It sounds too simple for experienced person. But I have no clue where to find "serial console".
Appreciate direction to manual or how to locate area for serial cable connectivity.
Had the same issue. You need to use the Onhub recovery utility on an old version of chrome to create the usb drive and then it boots without issues. Click the 3 dots on utility and it allows you to flash your own file to USB.
I have got the Asus SRT-AC1900 up and running on the 23.05.0 firmware. I had a lot of help in the TP-Link OnHub topic as that version is more popular. Just a few changes to make a customized firmware build to avoid using the ct wifi drivers.
I've been unsuccessful in all attempts to get Mesh, Proto-Relay or Fast Transition to work on the Asus and TP-Link OnHub routers even with lots of expert advice here and reading several wiki pages and watching YouTube videos. I'm positive I'm doing everything right, but it just doesn't work.
However, I have been completely successful getting the OnHub routers flashed with 23.05.0 firmware and operating as Travel Routers with VPN. I followed (generally) the instructions of Network Chuck who used a RaspberryPi 4. With the OnHub routers, you don't need to install a wifi dongle as the OnHub has three radios built in. You only need to use radio0 and radio1. You could use radio2, but the experts here say that should be avoided because it's a low power, limited capability antenna.
All of Network Chuck's instructions are at his website here:
There's an identical YouTube video of this, but the notes and scripts he references and uses in the project are not in the YouTube description and the link in the YouTube video does not work. Also, his script installs the wrong version of the OpenVPN package for the OnHub. Install the openvpn-mbedtls package for the OnHub instead of the version in his script.
And as an aside, if you want to try this project on an actual Raspberry Pi4, you can build a custom version of the 23.05.0 firmware with all the packages and it works great. It's a nice little project and can turn your OnHub into a very useful travel router or simple wireless bridge that works.
Posting this mostly for my reference in case I need to start from scratch again. Here are the packages I selected for a custom firmware build if you're going to make a travel router with VPN tunnel or wireless bridge out of an OnHub. Includes some resizing and disc checking utilities so you can use all the memory and storage space. I include the disc resizing utilities because if you later do an automated system upgrade, the process of installing updated firmware resizes your storage back to the default small partitions used by OpenWRT and you need to expand the storage again manually.
now time to hook usb hdd .