Hacker News Reader

Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Are there any routers with open source WiFi drivers that also keep their firmware up to date? WRT1900AC/WRT3200ACM situation because worse after NXP bought Marvell:

https://community.nxp.com/t5/Wireless-Connectivity/Drivers-f...

View on HN

You're better off building your own router and and buying a separate wifi access point.

For example, you can buy this: amzn.com/B07FKMJGD6 - Put PFsense or Shorewall on it, and get one of the many Wifi APs available on the internet.

The downside is more appliances, but the benefit is that you can swap one or the other our when you upgrade.

Yeah, you could, but Intel doesn't sell good MIMO cards for parallel access. I think at most they sell 2x2 ones? What is out there that has more and also has an open source driver with up to date firmware (if it's open - even better).

Here you go http://www.compexshop.com/index.php/cPath/57

Thanks! So it's using Ath10k? Does it work well in practice? In the past, anything but iwlwifi was really awful.

depends on what you buy, ath9k or ath10k. works well. those chips are mainly used for AP, so drivers are suitable. There is also more "AP Optimized" firmwares. used my own builds for many years but lately bought two netgears R7800 and flashed them with openwrt. the reason is that it's hard to find boards that can fit 2 oversized mini-pcie cards (one for 2.4 and one for 5) and cost of the build becomes too high. though on this compex shop they do have some "dedicated" boards, but they are somewhat underpowered if you want to throw a bunch of things on them. One big upside, it's very educational.

I've got ath10k and it's been pain for quite a long time, until I saw a suggestion on the Openwrt forum to try different combinations of kernel module and firmware, and kmod-ath10k-ct + latest ath10k-firmware [0] works fine since a year or so

The main issue was instabilty manifested in random packets loss and randomly crashing/not working (either 2.4 or 5GHz) APs

[0] https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware

Sounds like a mess. That's why I strictly stick to iwlwifi for desktop usage when needed, but to make a router, it would require something else.

This is both correct and incorrect at same time. ath10k covers a whole bunch of different chips. Newer stuff can be less stable/tested. The -ct (Candletech) firmwares/drivers in many cases can be better, but sometimes they have regressions of their own.

Edit: also as you mentioned kmod-ath10k-ct, it looks like you run it on some off the shelf wifi. Those tends to be trickier and less stable. AP that i assembled with compex cards were rock solid for years (ath9k + ath10k)

Why not just have a separate router and AP(s) that are all running OpenWRT? That's what I've done so I can upgrade my wireless without having to redo my network.

It is hard to replicate OpenWRT's GUI, terminal tools, and online resources with a bespoke for solution.

I personally haven't really used OpenWRT, so I'm not familiar with its GUI.

However, the PFSense GUI is pretty straightforward. Shorewall has no GUI and is all text based configuration, but personally I prefer that.

If OpenWRT supports wireless APs then sure that seems like great software to use. In my experience most Wireless APs have proprietary firmware and are not supported by most open source solutions. I block all egress on them.

Having a router/AP combo that runs OpenWRT is great, the solution I proposed just expands your hardware options for non OpenWRT compatible hardware.

I have been looking into this exact route. You sound like you have experience with this, so maybe you could give some recommendations:

a. How critical is it to use such dedicated hardware - could I use a RPI4 with an added usb3-gigabit eth adapter? (I don't need a wired lan, only a wifi one). How much worse would that be compared to the hw you link?

b. Which AP would you recommend? I think the Ubiquity AP lite one is reasonably low cost - are there better options with similar cost?

I'm not expert but I'm happy to share my learnings.

a. Running everything over a USB3 hub would probably work, you would just be looking at decreased total throughput ( depending on the hub ). Depending on what you're doing ( vlans ) the pi processor might become a bottleneck.

b. Most Wireless APs are mediocre and run some proprietary firmware ( including Ubiquity ). Personally I just got the cheapest one that supported my bandwidth requirements, and blocked if from being able to communicate with the internet ( the one I got would reach out to some AWS compute instance for who knows what ). Other than that they all kind of work the same. I know people who like the Ubiquity one because of it's nice UI.

Thank you.

Could you please link me to the specific AP you picked?

As an aside - this would make a good writeup if you had the time. Theres very little good info on this - at least that I could find.

I personally use shorewall on an Espressobin ( though any multi-port computer works ). The guide I followed is here: https://blog.tjll.net/building-my-perfect-router/

( BTW, I would not recommend the espressobin if you want gigabit speeds )

I can't find the one I got originally, but any wifi AP works, like amzn.com/B010S6SG3S Just get one for the approximate bandwidth you want to support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com