Sorry for the late answer. It seems as if the system forgot to subscribe me to this topic.
No first hand information here. I just wanted to be absolutely clear, so we won't break a newbie's heart in the process of continuous unfruitful self-torturing. I referenced that thread because it seemed to sum up the current status pretty compactly and anyway that was the last one I skimmed through.
I wanted to jump onto the 802.11ac bandwagon to have some inexpensive fun, but after seeing the seas of tears all over the place, I had to change my mind.
I am not following kernel development nowadays, so all my relevant information comes from quick web searches this time. If I am not mistaken, the status quo is that of all the open source drivers, only ath10k provides 802.11ac. As I've heard, dd-wrt works around these issues by favoring binary blobs from the OEM and/or signing proprietary agreements with the vendors. Neither of which OpenWrt would like to promote as I understand. The status quo will remain until vendors release full driver source or someone would pick up the great effort of reverse engineering, like an individual seeking adventure or research group having proper financial backing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compariso … ers#Status
Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something or if you know any fully supportable inexpensive 802.11ac devices. Note that many routers could be or have been supported up to booting and maybe in some cases even wifi works over the 802.11n cards (like in the C20), but I don't consider that real support, nor do I think that it's a good idea to purchase an AC router and use only the N radio. Of course this is a subjective matter, because some may find the extra flash, RAM or CPU power useful, and we do indeed need platform support if miracle happens and drivers start falling from the sky. However, I'd rather buy 2-3x as many low power N-only routers for the same price to increase density or reach. By the way, perhaps it would be worthwhile to add columns on the kind of support provided for each device, like whether the 5GHz radio is supported.
edit: Okay, add Marvell to the list of good guys. Perhaps it would be useful to keep a catalog of these? Or just update the kernel wireless wiki or Wikipedia about open source wireless chipset support and cross reference that to router models via some funky SQL query. http://www.snbforums.com/threads/offici … ver.21973/
zo0ok wrote:bkil wrote:C2 and C20i are almost the same. Don't buy it. Support is not mature. 5GHz not working.
bkil... These devices lack documentation on the wiki and the topic you refer to does not contain much. Do you have first hand experience with either (almost the same) device and can you share any information?
- Does flashing from firmware work?
- Does recovering OEM firmware work?
- Does 2.4GHz work?
- Status of the Gbit switch in C2?
- Is it stable?
- Any bootlogs?
I work on trying to improve the Wiki Table of Hardware and the device pages. If you have first hand information and just give brief answers here I can take care of updating the wiki.
I think these two (currently unsupported) devices could prove to be high-volume-OpenWrt-devices in the future.
(Last edited by bkil on 4 Jun 2015, 02:44)