WiFi 7 Support?

OpenWRT uses only LTS kernels as developers don't have time to maintain and backport security fixes themselves. The latest LTS kernel is 6.1 so until a new one comes out don't expect support for this SoC.

What most people don't understand is that OpenWRT tries to upstream to mainline kernel as much as possible and then use these features as it removes a lot of burden from developers and prevents double work. OpenWRT follows mainline and by doing that it is unlike any other vendor or custom firmware for routers.

What SoC vendors often do is use some OpenWRT version as a base (version that was stable at the time they started developing the SoC - so let's say 4-5 years ago) and then add their own proprietary patches and drivers on top. Then they sell the whole package (with source code under NDA) to device vendors. They make further customization and sell it to end users.

This is a wrong way to do it but the only available to hardware vendors as SoC vendors don't rebase their proprietary software on newer kernels / newer OpenWRT versions - they just publish feature or security updates for a year or two by backporting fixes to that original release.

What OpenWRT is doing instead is following what LTS mainstream linux distros are doing: every new release uses a new mainline LTS kernel. This enables OpenWRT to support all modern features from mainline and not have 10 different private APIs for configuring 10 different vendor NICs. And this also enables new version of OpenWRT based on new kernels to support almost all devices from previous releases.

In this example WiFi 7 requires Multi Link Operation that was mainlined only in Linux 6.5 in commit 3a8a670eeeaa40d87bd38a587438952741980c18

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