Support for ZyXEL NWA1123-NI

I managed to get the Device (Wifi AP) up&running with OpenWrt and almost everything seems to be functional:

  • GPIO (LEDs + Reset)
  • WLAN 2.4GHz
  • WLAN 5.0GHz
  • Ethernet (with workaround)

Since 2 days it is serving as an AP wihtout any issues :slight_smile:

Hardware details:

Model: ZyXEL NWA1123-NI
SoC/CPU: AR9342 @560MHz
RAM: 64MB
Flash: 16MB
Ethernet PHY: AR8035
WLAN 2.4GHz: AR9340 (SoC)
WLAN 5.0GHz: AR9382 (PCIe)

The problem: At the moment the ethernet interface needs to be brought up in uboot before booting OpenWrt to be functional. A boot with "cold" NIC results in high packet loss (more or less unusable). I think it is because some Registers of the PHY/SoC don't get set up correctly...

from target/linux/ath79/dts/ar9342_zyxel_nwa1123-ni.dts:

&mdio0 {
	status = "okay";

	phy-mask = <0>;

	phy0: ethernet-phy@0 {
		reg = <0>;
	};
};

&eth0 {
	status = "okay";

	/* default for ar934x, except for 1000M an 10M */
	pll-data = <0x06000000 0x00000101 0x00001313>;

	mtd-mac-address = <&art 0x1002>;

	phy-mode = "rgmii-id";
	phy-handle = <&phy0>;
};

What i have:

  • Source code of stock firmware
    Based on Attitude Adjustment and the SDK from Qualcomm/Atheros (linuxsrc-qualcomm)
    The SourceCode of the very similiar device (NWA1123-AC) is available online:
    https://github.com/kodolok/nwa1123-ac/

  • root access via telnet on stock firmware (/sys and /proc available)

  • And of course shell-access access to the device running OpenWrt SNAPSHOT, r11192-c3ffb0e7d5

=> How can i find out the correct settings for ethernet?

Hey guys,
I was able to resolve the issue with the GbE, it is working now.
Tested with flood-ping and iperf at 10, 100 and 1000Mbit FD. (iperf for 1Gbit was tested with briding two vlans on the device) => No packetloss and network speed seems to be normal :slight_smile:

In the meantime I also finished the documentation on the wiki:
https://openwrt.org/inbox/zyxel/zyxel_nwa1123-ni

The .dts can be found on the bottom of the wiki-page:
https://openwrt.org/inbox/zyxel/zyxel_nwa1123-ni#build_instructions

Could please someone have a look on the files i would suggest to commit?

Thank you,
Patrick

Hi Patrick,

I installed your last firmware compiled (OpenWrt 19.07.2 r10947-65030d81f3) for NI on my NWA1123-AC.

Ethernet : Ok
WLAN 2.4GHz : Ok

Only WLAN 5.0 GHz is not OK.

Have you an idea to resolve this problem?

Daniel

Hello Daniel,

sorry for late reply, I just returned from vacation :wink:

In general I don't think it is a good idea to flash the firmware of a different device, but luckily you didn't brick yours.
You will have to compile the firmware yourself, i would take a closer look at the pcie-section of the device dts, i think at least the pci-id will need to be changed as the AC has a different PCIe-Wifi-Module (maybe AR9580?; that seems to be the main difference between AC and NI).

Hello Patrick,
NWA1123-AC is now ok.

I create a new image for NWA1123-AC

I add ATH10k-ct and firmware ATH10k-ct

The PCIE is 9880 (may be 9882)

For Wifi 5Ghz, I had a problem to initialize PCI card. The caldata file in /dev/mtd8 (ART) seems to be not correct.

For this, I modified

/etc/modules.d/ath10k-ct

ath10k_core skip_otp=1
ath10k_pci irq_mode=1

And

/etc/hotplug.d/ieee80211/10_fix_wifi_mac

zyxel,nwa1123-ac)
                [ "$PHYNBR" -eq 0 ] && \
                        echo $(macaddr_add $(cat /sys/class/net/eth0/address) 2) > /sys${DEVPATH}/macaddress
                [ "$PHYNBR" -eq 1 ] && \
                        echo $(macaddr_add $(cat /sys/class/net/eth0/address) 1) > /sys${DEVPATH}/macaddress
                ;;

NWA1123-AC now run with openwrt.

Daniel.