I have recently bought this router and been running 19.07.7 for some time, running good until total lockup (wifi drops, and wired connection as well), not reachable via ssh nor luci.
I have tried using the latest build available on the toh page, and while this one is stable, the speed is much lower because of hardware nat not working.
I tried compiling it myself using the master branch and the end result is similar to what can be downloaded from toh page, no hardware nat.
For me this is extremely important as i get 920 down , 800 up , and without hardware nat i get about 500 down and 500 up
The old switch driver had HW offload support. Im not sure the current DSA driver has HW offload support for the mt7621 cpu. So most likely why its not working.
For now only software offloading would work with dsa driver.
The official branch doesn't have the router in the target builds list, I found a fork which does work but it locks up sometimes, completely (https://gitlab.com/db260179/xiaomi-m4a/-/releases)
Still using it as it is extremely fast:
If i will solve the lockup issue (dropped wifi connection(2.4 and 5g) , dropped lan connection, and no luci or ssh connectivity) I will buy this router again at least 3 time :)) that's how impressed I am with it.
hi, i personally dont use the offload feature as i need the sqm qos feature and that wont work with sw/hw offload feature.
Under certain load conditions it will lock up, its a bug in the mt7621, only the oem firmware get round this issue. Usually using the HW offload feature minimises this, but not always.
I haven't tested this as yet on the 21.02 branch for ramips, but it should work if the mt7621 SOC - remember there is no HW offload via switch to wifi. HW offload only works via ethernet, people always make this mistake. There is work in progress for HW offload wifi support.
So in regards to your lockup, does it lockup only on my firmware v19.07.8?
If so, then you could try the default openwrt mt76 driver - kmod-mt76 (you will have to use imagebuilder in the zip from my gitlab releases) and change from kmod-mt76-compat to kmod-mt76
See if that helps. Otherwise its the age old mt7621 bug that rears it ugly head on high load scenarios.
Ok, that's outstanding.
However, will this eventual release solve the random lockup that the current 19.07.8 has ?
The router runs superb, if only it would not lockup I would literally buy another 4 of them :)) .
I cannot reproduce the issue, I've tried with heavy traffic, no problem, then I do something random like logging in my my phone on my remote nextcloud instance, and everything goes down.
@db260179 I guess I'm lucky because I do not need sqm, but without hw nat, this router performs about the same with my old wr-1043Nv5.
Thank again everyone for each reply greatly appreciated the effort and knowledge that has been put here
Hi, v19.07 is now on maintenance mode only now so, no.
I would suggest migrating to v21.02, which i will be doing over the christmas time and do my own tweaks if need be. I'll probably add the missing ipv6 HW offloading patch then submit the patch upstream.
Just need to get my head around the new DSA layout.
I will be doing a separate post on mt7621 devices and the ongoing hw offloading and other issues for 21.02.
So far i've done a couple of patches in my repo:
Enable HW Offloading support for IPV6 on mt7621 devices
Hacky way to disable the Flow Control on the ports (needs improvement and advice) as it seems enabling flow control on ports triggers the netdev timeout issues for the mt7621 devices. - work in progress!
Both of these need user feedback, if confirmed fixed then will push upstream to the openwrt repos.
