Netgear R7800 and LEDE/OpenWRT

[jsmiddleton4]

Just a word of caution if you're like me and like to play around the road back to Netgear/Voxel's firmware from LEDE/OpenWRT is significantly more involved than the road back from say DD-WRT.

If you don't know how to use, I had to knock some cobwebs off in my brain, TFTP and Recovery Console, etc., I recommend not playing with LEDE/OpenWRT.

Seems like given DD-WRT has a return to default FW path that it is possible. I found nothing as easy or similar as just loading a default FW for LEDE and returning to Netgear's default FW.

Glad I remembered how to do the old fashion way and pushing the default FW......

 

[avtella]

Its not that hard you just turn off then on the router with a pin in the reset hole till the router starts flashing white:
then open command prompt and type cd C:\location of file firmware, and type tftp -i 192.168.1.1 PUT nameoffirmware.img (you can even use a tftp uploader to do the same)
thats it, router will take the firmware and reboot...

before the procedure;
change ip of computer to 192.168.1.2 and gateway to 192.168.1.1 in your computer's ethernet adapter setings.

Honestly there have been times where I tried DD-WRT and it screwed up and I had to do this anyway. This is actually a failsafe method... this procedure was standard even when the Netgear WNDR3800/3700v2 was around years back and was recommended to use on DD-WRT to return to stock if you look at their knowledge base. Both communities are really helpful so it really is not too bad to get back to stock as they would

With the R7800 and Qualcomm units, LEDE is much better than DD-WRT in my experience especially the fact that you have SQM Piece of Cake and more stable/higher performance.

 

[jsmiddleton4]

Yep. Still more complicated than DD-WRT.

 

[Gnufsh]

OpenWRT has been working great for me. SQM works very well for reducing bufferbloat. The only time I used the tftp flash procedure was to change the partition table to get access to the 70m netgear partition. hnyman has an excellent build targeted at the R7800 here:
https://forum.lede-project.org/t/build-for-netgear-r7800/316

 

[jsmiddleton4]

From what I could tell to use the USB and the eSATA ports it took a bunch of fooling around. LEDE IF you are LINUX handy and experienced probably okay. But for us mere mortals, its quite cumbersome.

 

[Gnufsh]

From what I could tell to use the USB and the eSATA ports it took a bunch of fooling around. LEDE IF you are LINUX handy and experienced probably okay. But for us mere mortals, its quite cumbersome.

Using the build I linked USB worked out of the box plugging in a hard drive. I haven't used eSATA

 

[Mordred]

Its not that hard you just turn off then on the router with a pin in the reset hole till the router starts flashing white:
then open command prompt and type cd C:\location of file firmware, and type tftp -i 192.168.1.1 PUT nameoffirmware.img (you can even use a tftp uploader to do the same)
thats it, router will take the firmware and reboot...

before the procedure;
change ip of computer to 192.168.1.2 and gateway to 192.168.1.1 in your computer's ethernet adapter setings.

Honestly there have been times where I tried DD-WRT and it screwed up and I had to do this anyway. This is actually a failsafe method... this procedure was standard even when the Netgear WNDR3800/3700v2 was around years back and was recommended to use on DD-WRT to return to stock if you look at their knowledge base. Both communities are really helpful so it really is not too bad to get back to stock as they would

With the R7800 and Qualcomm units, LEDE is much better than DD-WRT in my experience especially the fact that you have SQM Piece of Cake and more stable/higher performance.

That's complete nonsense. The R7800 OpenWRT maintainer gave up on this unit a long time ago, as he couldn't fix a few really bad issues, while DD-WRT has fixed all of these known issues. Performance/Latency is way better with DD-WRT. DD-WRT was also the first project that added support for it and OpenWRT mostly used their work to add support for it.

 

[avtella]

That's complete nonsense. The R7800 OpenWRT maintainer gave up on this unit a long time ago, as he couldn't fix a few really bad issues, while DD-WRT has fixed all of these known issues. Performance/Latency is way better with DD-WRT. DD-WRT was also the first project that added support for it and OpenWRT mostly used their work to add support for it.

Wait what, it’s fairly popular in LEDE . I’ve actively used LEDE so I can say it’s definitely not catastrophic as you make it seem. Maybe you were using OpenWRT after the LEDE/OpenWRT split or you probably used it in the very early days. They recombined.

I’m not sure when the last time you used it but quite a huge thread on the dev section for this router and even hnyman’ thread over at LEDE.

A lot of issues were fixed by the newer QCA wireless firmwares on the wireless side and LEDE devs made some improvements themselves. DD-WRT was better for a while on the latency side because they were still using the old 3.x kernel and they eventually had similar latency issues on tests with the newer kernel if I recall. Much of it is alleviated in newer LEDE/OpenWRT builds. SQM Piece of Cake in LEDE is what saved me bufferbloat wise, when I was on DSL, that wasn’t available in DD-WRT.

 

[Mordred]

DD-WRT has fixed all of the issues in their 4.9 kernel, now this unit kicks some butt, OpenWRT is completely behind. It use whatever qos works and SQM on OpenWRT just doesn't get close to the results that I get with DD-WRT.

 

[avtella]

To each his own, I’ve had the opposite experience with LEDE/OpenWRT. WiFi performance was fairly close to stock but the QoS is what kept me on it. “Piece of Cake” not the standard “Cake” is the one I use. I was fortunate to have 2 R7800s, both from Netgear tests from a while back, one which later I used on OpenWRT and one DD-WRT for direct comparisons. Granted different test environments and clients we may have different results.


In tests SQM “Piece of Cake” was generally better and was infact created by the same people who worked on FQ_Codel in the first place, as an improvement over FQ_Codel. Piece of Cake gave in general a higher download and lower latency for me over fq_codel as intended with consistent DSL Reports bufferbloat scores of A/A+ vs B/C on FQ_Codel on DD-WRT vs A/B/C on Stock streamboost (Believe it’s also FQ_Codel based). I even had to use slightly lower upload bandwidth limit settings on Codel vs Piece of Cake to get those scores above, 3.6 Mbps vs 4 Mbps. Without any QoS it was a down right F in Centurylink 40/5 DSL.

FYI I haven’t used DD-WRT in the past 5-6 months as I gave away my second R7800. Piece of Cake is pretty much what kept me in LEDE/OpenWRT when on DSL. Went back to stock eventually after getting cable as I actually use HT160 and I also no longer had major bufferbloat issues.

No doubt Kong has been really improving the R7800 as well, I do occasionally drop by on the DD forums.

 

[quadra2030]

What's the stability of the current ath10k (open source WiFi AC driver) in latest OpenWRT? I remember that wasn't very good compared to closed source QCA driver (which is used in stock firmware) in not so distant past.. been there, done that I hear that even LEDs for WiFi are working now (not that was the critical feature I need )..

 

[routine]

OpenWRT has been working great for me. SQM works very well for reducing bufferbloat. The only time I used the tftp flash procedure was to change the partition table to get access to the 70m netgear partition. hnyman has an excellent build targeted at the R7800 here:
https://forum.lede-project.org/t/build-for-netgear-r7800/316

What are the performances compared to the Voxel firmware? I knew that there was no full support for proprietary NG functions (like hw nat.) and performance not were the best. I do not know if the hnyman builds have solved problems.

 

[avtella]

You won’t get real hardware NAT on open source. The R7800 stock firmware is actually OpenWRT but an older version with proprietary firmware blobs and Netgear GUI added on.

If you want good performance, with things like working MU and beamforming, stock firmware .52 should be good. Voxel updates the outdated packages and does other optimizations to stock so his firmware would be best.

 

[quadra2030]

Hardware NAT is not a big problem, R7800 CPU (QCA IPQ8065 platform, 1,7 Ghz) is among the fastest in consumer routers (and still is after 2+ years!), wireless performance and stability is.. ath10k was/is poor neighbour (and is using binary proprietary blobs from QCA) compared to closed source featurewise and speedwise.. but at least it exists, Broadcom has no such open source alternative for their hw (AsusWRT and Merlin WiFi drivers are closed source tightly integrated with particular version of kernel/SDK), and OpenWRT policy doesn't allow closed source drivers anyway.

I do remember very good the beginnings of R7800 OpenWRT/LEDE on 3.x kernel, WiFi crashed almost daily, syslog was full of kernel/ath10k errors.. yeah, they moved to 4.x kernel with some support from code aurora project (QCA open source) and maybe it works better now.

I have to say, with stock 52 version everything just works.. yes, device list nonfunctionality in NG GUI is annoying, but not essential for operation.

 

[avtella]

Yeah WiFi was stable later on. With newer QCA9984 firmwares from the Qualcomm dev, pretty close to stock infact. Mind you I haven’t used OpenWRT or DD-WRT in a while.

 

[Mordred]

To each his own, I’ve had the opposite experience with LEDE/OpenWRT. WiFi performance was fairly close to stock but the QoS is what kept me on it. “Piece of Cake” not the standard “Cake” is the one I use. I was fortunate to have 2 R7800s, both from Netgear tests from a while back, one which later I used on OpenWRT and one DD-WRT for direct comparisons. Granted different test environments and clients we may have different results.


In tests SQM “Piece of Cake” was generally better and was infact created by the same people who worked on FQ_Codel in the first place, as an improvement over FQ_Codel. Piece of Cake gave in general a higher download and lower latency for me over fq_codel as intended with consistent DSL Reports bufferbloat scores of A/A+ vs B/C on FQ_Codel on DD-WRT vs A/B/C on Stock streamboost (Believe it’s also FQ_Codel based). I even had to use slightly lower upload bandwidth limit settings on Codel vs Piece of Cake to get those scores above, 3.6 Mbps vs 4 Mbps. Without any QoS it was a down right F in Centurylink 40/5 DSL.

FYI I haven’t used DD-WRT in the past 5-6 months as I gave away my second R7800. Piece of Cake is pretty much what kept me in LEDE/OpenWRT when on DSL. Went back to stock eventually after getting cable as I actually use HT160 and I also no longer had major bufferbloat issues.

No doubt Kong has been really improving the R7800 as well, I do occasionally drop by on the DD forums.

You should probably test latest kong dd-wrt it gives A+/A+ with fq_codel now and is able to do 1Gbps on 5G with measured with wifi.

 

[routine]

DD-WRT has fixed all of the issues in their 4.9 kernel, now this unit kicks some butt, OpenWRT is completely behind. It use whatever qos works and SQM on OpenWRT just doesn't get close to the results that I get with DD-WRT.

Is dd-wrt better than NG/Voxel fw in performance, bandwidth/bufferbloat ?? Does dd-wrt support nat hardware?

 

[vit5421]

According to my experience DD-wrt Kong is better in user interface options and bufferbloat. http://desipro.de/ddwrt/K3-AC-IPQ806X/?C=N;O=D
The NG/Voxel is better in performance, bandwidth and Nat hardware and probably wifi drivers

 

[avtella]

From a bufferbloat perspective both the open source options are a bit better. However even stock QoS is FQ_Codel based and it’s not too bad for most people, just need to set the right device priorities for your environment.

However with things like WiFi performance, NAT acceleration you are better of with a stock based firmware such as Voxel’s. He also updates most of the packages and has done some optimizations of his own so that would probably be a better one to try first.

Regardless of DD-WRT or OpenWRT the actual open source QCA9984 WiFi firmware is actually maintained by a Qualcomm engineer, Kalle Valo.

 

[vit5421]

Agreed 100%.
But my dsl report tests are showing twice better bufferbloat results with Kong ddwrt QoS FQ_Codel.
In any case NG/Voxel performance is better with my high speed Internet coz ddwrt Qos 5ghz wifi speed is 480 mbs maximum and not very consistent.