EDIT:  After much trial and error, the signal finally became strong when I change radio0 to the high channel (149) and radio2 to the low channel (36).  Have no idea why that worked. If anyone has any insights, I am open to hear them.

Does anyone else have a very weak 5GHz signal? My 2.4GHz is great, can get it all over the house, 5GHz radios get lost after 10ft away from the router.  Thoughts?

Config file:
config wifi-device 'radio0'
    option type 'mac80211'
    option hwmode '11a'
    option path '18000000.axi/bcma0:7/pci0000:00/0000:00:00.0/0000:01:00.0'

    option country 'US'
    option channel '36'
    option htmode 'HT40'
    option txpower '20'

config wifi-iface
    option device 'radio0'
    option network 'lan'
    option mode 'ap'
    option ssid 'Lucky5'
    option key 'password'
    option encryption 'psk2'

config wifi-device 'radio1'
    option type 'mac80211'
    option hwmode '11g'
    option path '18000000.axi/bcma0:8/pci0001:00/0001:00:00.0/0001:01:00.0/
0001:02:01.0/0001:03:00.0'
    option txpower '23'
    option country 'US'
    option channel '2'

config wifi-iface
    option device 'radio1'
    option network 'lan'
    option mode 'ap'
    option ssid 'Lucky24'
    option key 'password'
    option encryption 'psk2'
    option wds '1'

config wifi-device 'radio2'
    option type 'mac80211'
    option hwmode '11a'
    option path '18000000.axi/bcma0:8/pci0001:00/0001:00:00.0/0001:01:00.0/
0001:02:02.0/0001:04:00.0'
    option channel '149'
    option country 'US'
    option htmode 'VHT80'
    option txpower '20'

config wifi-iface
    option device 'radio2'
    option network 'lan'
    option mode 'ap'
    option key 'password'
    option encryption 'psk2'
    option wds '1'
    option ssid 'Lucky51'

(Last edited by jase-lv on 17 Sep 2016, 20:37)

It was described multiple times:
https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/netgear/r8000
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php … 78#p293778
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php … 73#p308173

Hi there,
I'm currently running OpenWrt Chaos Calmer 15.05.1 on a R8000. Currently it seems each radio seems to only support 3 VAPs in total. Adding a fourth disables the entire radio. Is this a real HW limitation (which would be a shame, given a 5 year old TP-LINK N600 can do more) or a bug in brcmfmac?

Anything I can do to help? I can gather logs if necessary.

compat-wireless package of 15.05.1 release didn't include
[PATCH] brcmfmac: rework function picking free BSS index

You'll need to wait for another release to have support for up to 4 BSSes.

I think some firmwares may even support 8 BSSes, but I didn't care that much about it to work on it yet.

Two points:
1) US != entire world
2) It doesn't seem to stop Linux distributions allow this. OpenWRT is just a Linux distribution, so I don't see why it should be doing anything different.

What about creating a custom region database where region 00 lists the frequencies appropriate to my locality? It also so happens that what OpenWRT considers frequencies allowed in zone 00 isn't what, say, CentOS considers to be allowed (specifically, 5GHz channels 50-112).

What exactly would stubbing this function out do?

I am fully aware of that, but channels 50-112 are unavailable regardless of the radio used.

Can someone list a list of countries that original R8000 firmware allows choosing?

I am not 100% certain, but IIRC it only lists things by region, not by country (e.g. Europe rather than list of individual European countries since the WiFi RF frequency use regulations are harmonized).

Can someone list regions then?

Wow, 8BSSes would actually solve a lot of problems for me right now. I'm more than capable to rebuild from the current trunk and integrate pending patches if you could point me into the right direction.

Another issue I'm currently seeing is that the 2.4GHz radio seems to dropout under load. I can still see the network on the clients but joining is impossible/existing client won't receive anymore data.

Any hints to gather more debug information from the wifi driver?

I'll let you know if I can find some time to work on this.

The best idea is to run monitor mode on independent machine and listen to the traffic of station that can't connect. You can use some filter like

wlan.sa == 00:11:22:33:44:55 or wlan.da == 00:11:22:33:44:55

then see at what point things go wrong. Is there Authentication/Association/4-way handshake there?

What exactly are you doing? Do you have many clients connected? Do you use iperf or something similar?

I had a hard crash (totally unresponsive on all interfaces) on R8000 (15.05.1 release OpenWRT version). The only thing I did that was different from regular usage is that about an hour before the crash I left the realtime bandwidth graph running in a browser window, but I cannot confirm whether it caused an OOM somewhere due to the log data.

so i have been using openwrt on my r8000 for a little more than a year (see my posts from earlier in this giant thread), and I have been having problems that i keep ignoring...

my main issue is that wifi sometimes stops working (devices disconnect, and can no longer even see the ssid being broadcast), and i have found a few times that it coincides with high utilization. (i was performing back to back speed tests to test something else, and wifi stopped working in the middle.)
    when this happened, my wired connection continued to work as normal, but when i tried to do things through the router gui, it would ask me to log in after every link i clicked, and i wasnt able to view the bandwidth graphs.
(this main issue is fixed with a reboot, but i would really like to avoid that...)

my other issue is that my samsung galaxy s4 always has a very poor connection, and is constantly dropping and reconnecting, while other devices work flawlessly. i would say that is all my phone's fault, but i have tested it at a friends house, and at work extensively, and it performed perfectly there... I understand that wifi can be very fickle to troubleshoot, so im hoping that this is connected to my main problem, and both will be fixed in... whatever steps i end up taking...

this is minor, but whenever i reboot the router, i am forced to rebooy my modem as well, or the router will never obtain an IP address...

I understand that more information is likely needed to diagnose my issue, so I'm open to trying whatever people suggest!

I'm currently running  "CHAOS CALMER (15.05.1, r48532)"

I can confirm this.

As I was trying to solve the otherwise described issue with channels above 48 not functional, I switched back to the stock firmware and it uses regions (Europe in my case for France) for wifi. This parameter is set globally, and not per radio.

Since I am not in the US, I cannot use channel 149 for any radio as my other devices won't connect to it.

I would very much solve this Wifi issue as OpenWRT is the only firmware that enables me to configure IPV6 and VLAN tagging to work with my ISP (Free/Proxad) on the R8000.

I can confirm this.
I also installed this router (with 15.05.1) for a family member.  The wireless seems to freeze up about once a month.  Have to reboot modem+router.  I don't live near this person,  so I don't have access to the log file.

Hopefully there will be a 15.05.2 release soon that will fix the problem.

Hello!

The R8000 died while trying to flash (not me).
Going around, the bootloader is killed: only the power LED is on, nothing is output to the console, no network activity, including TFTP, etc.
I am looking for a way to flash FLASH via JTAG. Is there data on the pinout? Judging by the proximity to SoC, it is he:

P.S.: restored by desoldering FLASH and programmer.

(Last edited by ABATAPA on 16 Apr 2018, 08:49)