R7800 LEDE community builds by hnyman

[Voxel]

FYI there is an official LEDE build for the R7500v1 if you feel like experimenting, not sure about how the 5Ghz works if at all. Quantenna really screwed over both ASUS and Netgear.

As I said: unfortunately there is no support of 5GHz for R7500v1 in opensource community. That was a reason for my start with all of this. Quantenna drivers is something... I know, there is a guy ILOVEPIE in OpenWRT who tried to make it workable, but first: I am not sure that his work is legal; and second: that he succeeded. These Quantenna drivers are some kind of virtual machine working inside R7500v1 router. Linux inside Linux. On the other hand, their protection style is very interesting for me. It would be interesting to crack their approach, but it is better for me to do not do that to keep my legality and safety.

So: that was a reason for my involvement into Netgear's FW improvements. Expensive router w/o 5GHz (R7500v1) was a nonsense for me in big city with a lot of 2.4GHz Wi-FI around. But I freeze R7500v1 support currently because R7800 is much more attractive for me.

Well, just FYI.

Voxel.

 

[avtella]

Looks like someone managed to reverse engineer hardware NAT for LEDE/OpenWRT, should be merged soon hopefully.

https://forum.lede-project.org/t/hardware-nat-for-lede/1094/169

 

[Voxel]

Looks like someone managed to reverse engineer hardware NAT for LEDE/OpenWRT, should be merged soon hopefully.

https://forum.lede-project.org/t/hardware-nat-for-lede/1094/169

Interesting. But I do not think it will be included into LEDE/OpenWRT officially. Because of legality.

Voxel.

 

[avtella]

I used the wrong language when I said "reverse engineer ". I don't think there's anything illegal, the guy is getting input from QCA contacts and it's from the QCA SSDK, he said the patches are going upstream next week. All he did was patch the SSDK stuff to work with the newer kernel.

EDIT: Looks like it's already pushed to staging in LEDE. It's only for the IPQ8065/QCA8337 Switch combo like the R7800. Looks like others are out of luck.

 

[sfx2000]

Interesting. But I do not think it will be included into LEDE/OpenWRT officially. Because of legality.

Voxel.

Not sure if it's a legal thing - if QCA releases source under a compliant license, then that's ok.

Thing is, would this be taken up as part of the mainstream kernel and other GPL sources. It really comes down to the project maintainers, whether they accept the code in or not.

 

[sfx2000]

As I said: unfortunately there is no support of 5GHz for R7500v1 in opensource community. That was a reason for my start with all of this. Quantenna drivers is something... I know, there is a guy ILOVEPIE in OpenWRT who tried to make it workable, but first: I am not sure that his work is legal; and second: that he succeeded. These Quantenna drivers are some kind of virtual machine working inside R7500v1 router. Linux inside Linux. On the other hand, their protection style is very interesting for me. It would be interesting to crack their approach, but it is better for me to do not do that to keep my legality and safety.

Quantenna uses a tailored Linux kernel with real-time enhancements - it's an elegant solution for a standalone AP, but it does make integration with a Broadcom (or other) platform. Some use RGMII, some use PCI/PCI-e...

Truth be told - all WiFi chipsets have a private RTOS running things on the WiFi side - what I mean by private - the insides are not exposed to the host SoC, but rather by some API - ThreadX and eCos are most common there.

As a side note - QTN uses the Synopsis ARC cores - ARC stands for Argonaut RISC Core - which has it's roots in the NES SuperFX cartridges back in the day - Doom, StarFox - which in some ways, closes the circle - odd how that is...

 

[Voxel]

I used the wrong language when I said "reverse engineer ".

This guy used the same language

i've rewritten the qca hwnat patches from scratch built upon rev-eng knowledge derived from ssdk.

Voxel.

 

[avtella]

Well considering the LEDE devs moved it to staging, it's probably legal since it's from SSDK. Guessing it should enter the official builds in the upcoming version.

https://git.lede-project.org/?p=lede/blogic/staging.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/qca8k