Hey guys, I have a main router and a wireless repeater both with OpenWrt installed. They’re connected wirelessly via WDS.
Can I enable software/hardware flow offloading on the wireless repeater in this case? Both are MT76 devices.
"Flow offloading" happens on the switch that connects the ethernet ports, and will not affect WDS or other wireless traffic.
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Flow offloading works with routing, while the WDS repeater acts as a bridge, not as a router. There is a bridger package that is supposed to help with software flow offloading in this situation.
However, I still don't recommend enabling flow offloading because there is a bug that it remembers the exact bridge port to direct the packets to, and will thus break wireless client roaming.
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Thanks for the info @patrakov I did enable offloading on my repeater for testing it and FT was working even with it enabled. Also confirmed it through hostapd logs.
Is it risky to continue with this setup?
FT itself would work, the question is what would then happen with the IP packets and Ethernet frames. The issues are that, first, without the bridger package, the offload will do nothing on the repeater, and, second, if you enable it on the main router, or if you install bridger, this could result in misdirected packets (e.g., still sent to the repeater even though the client is no longer reachable via the repeater and should be contacted directly) after roaming.
Thanks again, I have disabled offloading on both the routers.
One last question I had, my repeater is dual band, if I want to enable the 2.4ghz radio should I just add one with AP mode or do I need to repeat the steps for wds setup?