Users needed to test Wi-Fi stability on Linksys WRT3200ACM & WRT32X on OpenWrt 21.02

Have you tried this?

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If you don’t mind, could you please describe your steps for how you disabled ipv6 in your setup? Or link to a post with the steps you followed. Thank you.

@adworacz Excellent job! I will try this build out tonight and I will throw everything at it, including the kitchen sink.

I will give this build a thorough test now for a solid 4-5 days.

I get it, this thread is mean for 3200acm/32x, however multiple people commented with issues on 1900 devices and as long as it's not confirmed that only 3200acm/32x are affected, it might be a common problem.

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One thing that I know for a fact and from previous experience, mwlwifi does not get along well with Intel wireless chipsets. As a matter of fact, the combination was always a disaster. Particularly with Intel wireless chipsets that were a couple of years older.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what wifi chipset is in our mobile devices. Especially iPhones because the same model can be released with 2 or 3 different wifi chipsets depending on supply and manufacturing.

I wonder if Intel wireless chipsets are the majority of devices involved in this issue. I don’t know, but I am curious.

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Pretty much this should be enough. Put these three lines into /etc/sysctl.conf

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1

net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1

net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1
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Those were exactly my thoughts when I first posted here. My wifi issues with my WRT1900ACS where strangely similar, including the trigger being mostly Apple devices. However I was able to solve it with this.

I am not familiar with OpenWRT's maintainership and policies. Is it possible to upstream the mac80211 version revert just for the WRT3200ACM?

No, it is a global package, common to all devices.

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Thanks to adworacz for providing build r16335.

I installed AdubWrt 21.02-SNAPSHOT r16335-4b0f87729c / LuCI openwrt-21.02 branch git-21.314.39479-e1ccb66 on my Linksys WRT3200ACM and Wifi now works flawlessly without any cutouts so far.

I also could install several additional packages without any issues and will do further tests, but things look great.

Is it likely, that adworacz's solution will be incorporated into future master builts in the neaar future?

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Glad to hear your testing is going well!

Is it likely, that adworacz's solution will be incorporated into future master builts in the neaar future?

At this point, no, this fix will never be pushed upstream, as @hnyman states above.

The issue is caused by an incompatibility between the WRT3200ACM / WRT32x firmware + driver and mac80211 5.8+ (which is why I'm using 5.7.5 in this test build). Considering that OpenWRT master is on mac80211 5.10+ and will continue to upgrade moving forwards, we'll never see this fixed upstream.

Either myself or other community members can continue to maintain builds (especially against 21.02) that fix this issue for a while, but the WRT3200ACM and WRT32X's days are numbered unless by some miracle the driver/firmware blobs get updated by the owning company (unlikely at this point).

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A big part of me wants to jump straight into the miracle build from today, r16335 (21.02.1 - kernel 5.4.158 - mac80211 downgraded to 5.7.5), and move on from the issue at the heart of this thread. It looks like a few users are already testing this build which is great. I am ridiculously excited to use this build since that is the fruits of the labor from the many users on this thread.

However, I'm going to take one for the team and play with the dirty builds for another day or two because I have some more ideas for hopefully finding the issue that triggers this wireless cutout bug.

My laptop that has not been affected by this bug throughout all of this testing has an Atheros wireless card in it. I actually have an older Intel wireless AC card that I have swapped in my laptop now so that I can test later tonight.

If I can reproduce the issue on this laptop, that would be fantastic. My Atheros card only had one advanced wireless capability setting to modify in Windows. My Intel wifi card driver has 21 or 22 advanced wireless settings that I can fiddle with. So my first goal is to reproduce the issue. The second goal is to see if any of those advanced wireless card driver settings might help to figure out what the issue is. I will have to test various things while only changing one of those settings at a time.

Apple's iPhones and iPads had no real low-level settings to toggle for testing purposes. So hopefully I will be able to reproduce the wireless cutout issue on my Windows laptop that now has an Intel wireless card in it for the purpose of testing.

I wonder if it would be possible to spot the differences between mac80211 5.7.5 and 5.10 (or 5.8).
This can help either fix it upstream or make a patch in OpenWRT to fix it

This is a great idea. However, I am not a developer myself. Some of the more experience developers have suggested that the bug is more than likely in the mwlwifi driver itself, and that is unfortunately abandoned. It has been suggested that the driver would likely have to be rewritten from scratch.

My goal is to find out exactly where its failing and hopefully find some sort of workaround. If we can figure out a workaround, then we can possibly get a patch for a simple workaround into the mwlwifi driver codebase.

The reality is that there are so many uncertainties right now because of all of this. But this latest build of @adworacz 's work may end up serving as some sort community build or fork to keep mwlwifi-based WRT routers alive. And possibly patches and package updates can still occur to a certain degree.

Austin,

Any insight how long a build like this can keep taking updates via opkg without reverting the wifi stability?

I would assume only a sysupgrade from a new mainstream release would overwrite the 5.7.5 version of mac80211?

Thanks!

I also got to this thread when my WRT1900ACS had similar 21.02 problems: 5 Ghz disconnects from iPhones/Mac and my Dell laptop with intel chipset. I didn't realize the chipset differences, and am glad to see the info posted.

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@kevdel In theory it can take updates via opkg for a long time. The only package effected is kmod-mac80211, so that will need to be specifically held back if any updates come along that might overwrite it.

But it would be easy to re-install the downgraded package from my site. You could just download a file like the following and then run an opkg install <file> on it: https://openwrt.austindw.com/linksys-wrt/working-wireless/r16335/packages/kmod-mac80211_5.4.158+5.7.5-1-1_arm_cortex-a9_vfpv3-d16.ipk

We're probably safe though, since many of the kmod packages are tied to the kernel version, and the kernel doesn't update via opkg, only sysupgrade (new flash).

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@adworacz

Forcing 5.7.5 on a 21.02 build (and beyond) could be the holy grail of a support bulletin for this issue!

Thanks for the great efforts!

this problem is also common in ddwrt with iPhones / Mac !

https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=329061&sid=92522c838c272167e5baacae697b7bf9

https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=328995&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=90

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Thank you for your recommendation!

I copied here I saved and reboot and there is an improvement in stability in the speed test ...
it is correct how I proceeded ?

Speaking of packages. We could probably point the distfeeds to official OpenWrt 21.02.1 stable package repo for general packages. Obviously, kmods would absolutely have to point to your server though because they are very specific. This is something to think about.