OpenWRT for Linksys WRT1900AC

[htismaqe]

Other thread?

Sorry. Trying to avoid getting this thread off-topic, Tim has been policing us too much lately.

http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=17594

 

[RMerlin]

Personally, I wouldn't hold my breath on official OpwnWRT support. The router has been availble for over 6 weeks now. As pointed out, so far it's either precompiled binaries provided by Linksys, or tinkerers who are patching the official OpenWRT code with Linksys's patches and experimenting with it. I'm skeptical at Marvell ever accepting to provide the complete source code to their driver, which is a non-negotiable requirement for the core OpenWRT developers. A lot of the patch code would also need to be rewritten as it does not meet with the OpenWRT project standards, userspace code ending up in kernel space, etc...

At best you might see some unofficial forks from tinkerers.

The mailing list posts where the actual core devs are active are indeed quite enlightening, as you see Linksys's patch submissions being turned down, and the explanations as to why they are.

 

[sfx2000]

At best you might see some unofficial forks from tinkerers.

Much like the ASUS unofficial builds, eh?

Those "tinkerers" do find some excellent solutions to bugs within the official releases. Present company included...

sfx

 

[lexist2112]

Much like the ASUS unofficial builds, eh?

Those "tinkerers" do find some excellent solutions to bugs within the official releases. Present company included...

sfx

Been over at the OpenWRT site and saw your post in regards for some "magical" thing to come in the next few weeks. Honestly, I am grateful you guys have been pouring your heart and soul over the FW build. If it weren't for you and the rest of the WRT community, we would be left with Linksys to release a "safe" build.

Well, waiting patiently for you guys, and when it's right, you'll release it to the rest of us......"jailbreakers"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[sfx2000]

Been over at the OpenWRT site and saw your post in regards for some "magical" thing to come in the next few weeks. Honestly, I am grateful you guys have been pouring your heart and soul over the FW build. If it weren't for you and the rest of the WRT community, we would be left with Linksys to release a "safe" build.

Well, waiting patiently for you guys, and when it's right, you'll release it to the rest of us......"jailbreakers"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm not a direct participant in any of the online *WRT communities - I've signed away too many NDA's to be useful.

But I'm with you - the "tinkerer" community has done the collective huge favors when chasing down issues - and active folks, we've seen their changes get rolled back into the production mainline builds...

rmerlin made a great comment about the GPL dump from Linksys - and I share his view - if they would have done a "buildable" release of the OEM code, many of the issues that have been reported, likely would have been fixed already.

 

[chadster766]

OpenWRT now has the wireless driver source code

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=240734​#p240734

 

[RMerlin]

OpenWRT now has the wireless driver source code

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=240734​#p240734

When I referred to that post, someone told me that this poster is actually from Belkin. That means Belkin received the source code, but the OpenWRT devs don't have it in their hands yet (unless that has happened after this post).

Either way, it does seem that they are getting closer to it at least.

 

[jalyst]

OpenWRT now has the wireless driver source code

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=240734​#p240734

No it doesn't, 9+ days later & it still doesn't, at least it hasn't been officially announced yet.
That's simply a promise (or hope) that it'll be available "soon", I'm getting bloody sick of this.

Read the last 2 pages here, useful insights for everyone...
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=256298&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=180

 

[sfx2000]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc1Mzk

and deeplinked there...

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=242104#p242104

TL;DR - Marvell is still reluctant to release a fully open-source driver - OpenWRT seems to want everything - and it's likely not going to get that - Linksys and Marvell have gone about as far as they can.

OpenWRT tends to adhere very closely to the overall GNU/Linux philosophy - code is best when it is set free for others to observe, tweak, modify, etc...

The chipset is a soft MAC, meaning that firmware on boot needs to be loaded into the chip - this is a common approach - but that firmware has "secret sauce" developed internally and also licensed in some cases where the license for that code is incompatible with GPL v2/v3 - hence the best they can probably do is provide well documented header files for the firmware object file...

and the OpenWRT project is rejecting that...

oh well... it's not a tech issue, it's above that on what can be shared...

 

[jalyst]

A more comprehensive overview is here, read from here (at least) till the end of the thread, that's important:
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=240733#p240733
Tis also important to read from this post (at least), till the very last page:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=903090#903090
It's nothing short of a joke, devs who've remained patient & backed Belkin through it all, are now finally losing their patience.

 

[Mordred]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc1Mzk

and deeplinked there...

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=242104#p242104

TL;DR - Marvell is still reluctant to release a fully open-source driver - OpenWRT seems to want everything - and it's likely not going to get that - Linksys and Marvell have gone about as far as they can.

OpenWRT tends to adhere very closely to the overall GNU/Linux philosophy - code is best when it is set free for others to observe, tweak, modify, etc...

The chipset is a soft MAC, meaning that firmware on boot needs to be loaded into the chip - this is a common approach - but that firmware has "secret sauce" developed internally and also licensed in some cases where the license for that code is incompatible with GPL v2/v3 - hence the best they can probably do is provide well documented header files for the firmware object file...

and the OpenWRT project is rejecting that...

oh well... it's not a tech issue, it's above that on what can be shared...

I don't understand how anyone can backup Belkin or Marvell anymore. These two companies are completely incompetent. They are either lying at users or have no clue. I mean, there must be a contract between the two parties and the delivery of the driver, must be absolutely clear from the start.


If you look back in time. Then you will see how badly Belkin approached OpenWRT. They sent patches of the lowest quality, without correctly sending them (without wrapping), with binaries. No OpenWRT dev received a unit before these patches were sent. They did not contact any OpenWRT developer before they released the unit and sent patches, although they have announced OpenWRT support month ago at the CES.

Do you think any opensource developer wants to work with such a company?

A few companies obviously think they can just quickly throw out their unfinished stuff and then let opensource developers fix their shirt for free.

OpenWRT stated:

Having seen the driver, I can say that even with full source code available it would be hard to get it accepted into OpenWrt for a number of reasons:
- Crappy non-standard ioctl interface instead of standard Linux wireless APIs.
- No support for upstream hostapd, requires an old version hacked up with a bunch of crappy patches.
- Bad code quality.

So lets put this altogether again:

-Marvel and Belkin have a contract, they must have known from the beginning what they can deliver and obviously they wanted to deliver binary only, with the pressure they got, they quickly hacked together some BS they can publish in order to calm down the masses

-Marvels source code is of bad quality and unmaintainable as they did not follow any rules that you have to follow, if you intend to share code with others. Now they want opensource developers to do their homework

-Belkin did not supply OpenWRT devs with hardware as they asked for it

- If everything is so clear for you from a source code fw perspective, why did Marvel not work with the linux kernel devs to get this into mainstream kernel months ago?

sfx2000 unless you show, that you can do better then the openwrt devs you should not start judging/questioning their approach.

 

[jalyst]

People who claim to have "known" all along are just as bad (if not worse)...

There's lots of VERY clued-up & informed people* in the OWRT community & elsewhere, who had good reason to think this may indeed pan out.**

It (clearly) is not looking that way now, there could be some final unforeseen twists, but I very much doubt that.


*not influenced by any kind of bias or fanboyisms, just sheer technical curiosity
**prolly not wrt54g kinda pan out (that's never been -fully- replicated), but close enough

 

[sfx2000]

I don't understand how anyone can backup Belkin or Marvell anymore. These two companies are completely incompetent. They are either lying at users or have no clue. I mean, there must be a contract between the two parties and the delivery of the driver, must be absolutely clear from the start.


If you look back in time. Then you will see how badly Belkin approached OpenWRT. They sent patches of the lowest quality, without correctly sending them (without wrapping), with binaries. No OpenWRT dev received a unit before these patches were sent. They did not contact any OpenWRT developer before they released the unit and sent patches, although they have announced OpenWRT support month ago at the CES.

Well - I'm pretty much on the side of the OpenWRT community in that there is a reasonable expectation of what should be delivered - code quality, transparency, and more importantly, the ability to sustain the driver moving forward as the Linux Kernel evolves.

I've seen the code - it's functional, but not what OpenWRT needs to maintain...

OpenWRT isn't Marvell or Belkin/Linksys centric, and the current code offered puts a burden on a organization that is basically a group of deeply committed and engaged volunteers...

I would agree that the openWRT statement at the WRT1900ac launch was premature, and lacked understanding of what the FOSS community does.

sfx

 

[chadster766]

Just to keep this forum informed you should be aware of interesting new developments with WRT1900AC OpenWRT:

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=244714#p244714
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=245282#p245282
https://github.com/TheDgtl/mrvl_wlan_v7drv
https://github.com/OperatorOverload/mrvl_wlan_v7drv/
https://github.com/notnyt/Mamba/tree/attitude_adjustment
https://github.com/Chadster766/McWRT

 

[RogerSC]

Just to keep this forum informed you should be aware of interesting new developments with WRT1900AC OpenWRT:

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=244714#p244714
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=245282#p245282
https://github.com/TheDgtl/mrvl_wlan_v7drv
https://github.com/OperatorOverload/mrvl_wlan_v7drv/
https://github.com/notnyt/Mamba/tree/attitude_adjustment
https://github.com/Chadster766/McWRT

Can you please tell me where this source code came from? Is it officially supplied and supported by Linksys/Belkin/Marvell? Will bugfixes from Marvell also go into this driver source as time goes on?

I'm curious, since the last I saw, the Linksys person posting there seemed to have given up on providing official source.

 

[FattysGoneWild]

They are just hack and slash attempts hoping to get something going.

 

[chadster766]

Note from OpenWRT developers:
All the new WRT routers have their own firmware images in trunk, you have to use the right one.
WRT1900AC(v1) - Mamba
WRT1900ACv2 - Cobra
WRT1200AC - Caiman

 

[thiggins]

Note from OpenWRT developers:
All the new WRT routers have their own firmware images in trunk, you have to use the right one.
WRT1900AC(v1) - Mamba
WRT1900ACv2 - Cobra
WRT1200AC - Caiman

Links, please?

 

[chadster766]

The prebuild images can be found in the OpenWRT trunk or developer's evolving images:

http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/mvebu/generic/
https://downloads.openwrt.org/people/kaloz/

If you build the images from source you will need to select the right one in "make menuconfig" from the trunk source.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks