@johndoe

I put in a bug report for wifi yesterday, and am currently re-compiling a new image that should take care of the wifi problem. 

More to come -- thanks

**EDIT**

The latest download included new wifi drivers that seemed to have an issue with kernel 4.4.32. I'm now compiling with kernel 4.4.35 which the driver supposedly gets along with.

(Last edited by davidc502 on 1 Dec 2016, 00:16)

Fingers crossed it gets good feedback

@david
Thanks for all your efforts to give us the best firmware for our wrt1x00acx routers. Good luck with the testing.

--bill

What's the good word boss? Any luck with the newer Kernel, or not as you had hoped?

On a side note, have you tried playing with "cake" SQM on your ACS?

@cybrnook2002

Actually, the new build will be 'building' tonight and into the morning, so I should be able to start trying it out some time tomorrow.  In the meantime I fell back to r2221 which is rock solid.

Haven't played around with cake sqm yet. Maybe I'm wrong in my thinking, but didn't think it would really help out since I'm fortunate enough to have a fiber connection. It's supper low latency, and handles pretty much what I throw at it. Originally, I had a 1 gig connection, but downgraded to 100mbps after realizing it was a bit more than I needed

Just wanted to add, this is a great post.

I stood up a VM this evening on Ubuntu 16.04.1, and of course the package list was a little different. - most of the other packages come by default

I was able to just use the base build-essential and some *-dev packages (and of course git hehe)

I am currently compiling from your little guide :-)

Few gotchas, like:
- don't run as root :-) (bad habit of mine)
- ./scripts/feeds update -all   ( is actually -a, not -all)
- ./scripts/feeds install -all     ( is actually -a, not -all)
and likely a few others....

but I am getting there. My next questions will be about picking and choosing commit to build off of / Kernels / Drivers / and of course "Packages" etc.... but I can research on my own as well. Just wanted to say thanks!

I assume since this is all scripted and serial, we are favoring cpu speed per core and not the amount of cores..... At least that's what I am seeing, just watching the process jump from core to core shooting to %98. (but only ever over one core)

We are on a similar connection (bandwidth wise), latency may be another thing as I am still on archaic Comcast coax :-) but at 105/15 (provisioned at 125/25). However, of course I fail dslreports buffer bloat challenge, which twists my ocd..... That is the core of my venture into cake.

On a side note, I have noticed two Easter eggs in the WRT1900ACS builds:

1. the fan script for the ACv1 is still in cron (schedule). I would assume a build for the ACS would not need this. But I guess this all started with the ACv1, so it's just inherited in all the builds at this point?

2. The default interface for SQM is set to eth1. Which, I believe on the ACS should be set to eth0. So be careful if you do start to test QoS.

(Last edited by cybrnook2002 on 2 Dec 2016, 19:25)

Will be interested in your results. I had the impression that SQM or QoS in general isn't required in a large 1Gbps link that will hardly be saturated all the time.

On a similar note, there were old threads discussing how OpenWRT is slower than original firmware and without "hardware NAT", routing speed is sub par. It took a lot of searching for me to confirm that WRT1900AC with OpenWRT can come close to 1Gbps NAT routing speed.

Perhaps this piece of information should be more prominent.

I'm looking for some help with download speeds on a new WRT1900ACSv2 I just bought. My goal is to replace my current D-Link DIR-825. Currently, I get 125/10 (wired) with the old router which is running CC15.05. Internet connection is Comcast 150/10 through a Motorola SB6120 modem.

With the D-Link, I can basically load a new version of OpenWRT on it and get that performance without changing any settings. With the new WRT1900ACS, I'm having issues. I've tried the stock firmware, DD-WRT, and (my preference) davidc502's 11/26 build of OpenWRT. With OpenWRT, I'm getting about 40/10 by default. With stock firmware, I get about the same by default, but if I fiddle with the media prioritization enough I can get 135/0.02 (upload basically non-existent). I did manage to get DD-WRT up to 100/10, but then tried to install a new build and could never get it back. Local wireless/wired speed appears to be good - it's just the Internet connection (all the tests here were done through wired).

I don't understand why this router is having so many speed issues. Does anyone have any thoughts on what settings to change to increase the speed? I've tried fiddling with QoS and SQM but that hasn't improved things much. Given that I have gotten 135 Mbps download speeds, I think the router can handle it - it's just figuring out what it needs settings-wise to get both download and upload speeds correct (preferably on OpenWRT and not stock).

2 days ago, I performed speed tests to the 1900acs through NAT, and I was consistently getting 850-900mbps. I have a second router, on a different network, connected to the outside interface of the 1900acs. From there, I just connect a NAS to the 2nd router, and then connect to it from a PC behind the NAT. Downloading video files from the NAS to the PC is just like doing speed tests as if connected to a Gigabit WAN..

Besides throughput I was specifically looking at CPU utilization which maintained around 32%. The load wasn't balanced as CPU0 was doing 90% of the work.

Thanks for the reply. I think I have a better understanding of the problem now and it's more related to uploads than downloads (and not to NAT speed at all). Specifically, there seem to be two modes of operation for the router:

1) High (probably full) downstream speed but uploads stall out after a second (and in some cases never make it through).
2) Low (20-30 Mbs) downstream speed but uploads are stable at 10 Mbps

It's almost always in the first mode, but I can sometimes get it into the second mode after a reboot (typically with SQM and/or QoS turned on, but I'm not sure those are requirements). This is not a NAT issue as I get the same behavior happens when uploading from the router itself.

When connected via the old router, I don't think I've ever seen the stalled uploads.

This may just be some kind of incompatibility between the router and the modem. I tried dropping the MTU to 1490 but that didn't seem to help (maybe even made it worse).

Any thoughts on anything to try besides buying a new modem?

Hi David

Thanks for your contribution and really liked your builds!

May I check with you if the CESA acceleration is working for you in recent builds (say r2221)? My WRT1900ACv2 is currently on r2221 and current has:

kmod-cryptodev    4.4.32+1.8-mvebu-2
libopenssl    1.0.2j-1

installed from your repo, but running openssl engine gives me only:

root@WRT1900AC:~# openssl engine
(dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support

dmesg yields only the following line relating to CESA:

[    1.208654] marvell-cesa f1090000.crypto: CESA device successfully registered

Thanks!

@shysdl

This probably isn't going to be the problem, but always check layer 1 first, so change the cable with a new short length CAT5e or CAT6. This is the cable between the modem and router. Then change out the cable from the router to the PC. It may sound like a pain, but it's worth the hassle.

Secondly, do a constant ping check to google.com. Let it run for about 5 minutes and then stop it. What you want to see if if there are dropped packets.

(Last edited by davidc502 on 3 Dec 2016, 04:21)

@david

Thanks again for all the help! I don't think it's layer 1 - I've tried both the cable that came with the WRT1900 and the original cable. Both are 3 feet or so. The fact that it works fine connected via the old router indicates something between the modem and the router to me. Also I'm pretty sure it's not on the PC side - I get the same behavior uploading directly from the router (scp to a VPS I have) and on both wireless and wired from the PC.

I haven't tried "regular" pings yet. I did a bit of ping flood testing over wireless and I see a somewhat higher fraction of dropped packets with the WRT1900 vs the old router but it's just a few percent more. I don't think it's that bad. I'll try your test over the weekend as I modified the WRT1900 to be access point only for now.

To be honest, I feel like there is some kind of hardware setting that is causing these problems, likely related to QoS, combined with some weird incompatibility with my admittedly somewhat old modem. I don't think it's an OpenWRT problem - my old router running CC15.05 runs beautifully and the WRT1900 has this problem on OpenWRT, DD-WRT, and stock.

So maybe a good question: is all traffic prioritization (QoS, SQM) handled by the CPU, or does changing any of those settings modify any hardware setting? If it does, that might be the culprit for me.

That is going to be a negative. I've tried dynamic as well as crypto-dev (On earlier builds), and can't seem to download any faster than 6mbps when connecting the router as a client to a VPN server.  The most current builds fail to load crpyto-dev, so dynamic seems to be the only choice.

Let me know if you find any patches, setting or suggestions that might help fix this issue.

root@lede:~# openssl speed -evp aes128 -elapsed -engine cryptodev
invalid engine "cryptodev"
3069928644:error:25066067:lib(37):func(102):reason(103):NA:0:filename(/usr/lib/engines/li                                        bcryptodev.so): Error loading shared library /usr/lib/engines/libcryptodev.so: No such fi                                        le or directory

thanks,

(Last edited by davidc502 on 3 Dec 2016, 05:17)

Regarding CESA engine:

Remember, the hardware acceleration really only offloads the CPU workload.  This isn't a core i7 crypto engine we're talking about here so you shouldn't expect ridiculous throughput.  In reality you will get better throughput (on Shelby/Caiman/Rango) without the CESA engine because the CPUs are smoking fast.  CPU workload goes to 100% on a single core during intense crypto, however.

In addition, for the crypto core to shine you need to pick ciphers it will accelerate, etc.  You don't need to do anything special to get the engine to kick in, if CESA is loaded the kernel will pick the "best" option based on the crypto it needs to do.

Regarding 5G wifi drops:

I recently saw the same.  I rebuilt EVERYTHING (toolchain, tools, openwrt) with the latest (as of 12/02) and there are still drops.  Reverted to 11/27, rebuilt EVERYTHING and all is stable.  Therefore I'm reasonably sure there is a commit after this date that interacts with the driver.  Based on updates to tools as well as base code, this may be really time consuming to bisect.

Hello,

I tried rolling back from r2321 to r2221, but I get following message when choosing the image and clicking "flash image". I unchecked "keep settings" before.

I tried both of your files for my WRT1900ACS:
- lede-mvebu-linksys-wrt1900acs-squashfs-factory.img
- lede-mvebu-linksys-wrt1900acs-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin
which I got from following link: http://davidc502sis.dynamic-dns.net/mve … _r2221.zip

Any help please?

(Last edited by johndoe on 3 Dec 2016, 12:02)

Upgrade from ssh console using "sysupgrade -F" to override the image format check.

The update format verification was updated/changed in the past few weeks, so going down is a bit harder as the old images do not contain the new format ID metadata.

commits making the change:
https://git.lede-project.org/?p=source. … 031e4b1d58
https://git.lede-project.org/?p=source. … 87ba6111af

I successfully downgraded to r2221, but I'm still facing wifi problems on some channels @5GHz.

For example, with channel 52 and channel width at 80MHz, I can't connect to the assigned SSID.
It's working fine with channel 36 on the same settings.

Edit: Same problem with channels 100+, I tried this with 2 WRT1900ACS on factory settings.

It just shows me "Birate: = ? Mbit/s" on the SSID.

On one of my APs the 2,4GHz band is not coming up with channel 1 configured. I don't get what's wrong, wifi seems really broken. Everyone told r2221 is stable?

(Last edited by johndoe on 3 Dec 2016, 15:09)

If you want to hang on, I'll be posting new images this evening.

Just did set up everything - But I'll test them tonight, since I had a great experience with one of your old images (never change a running system, heh).

(Last edited by johndoe on 3 Dec 2016, 15:12)

You might wanna doublecheck that both modem and router are using 1000mbit/full duplex on their interfaces. Had this issue once and it turned out to be a problem with auto negotiation.

///Rickard

I'm considering installing this image on my 3200ACM as the stock firmware is lacking a few critical features. I was wondering if you could provide some insight to how stable the firmware is? Are there any known issues? Is the firmware mostly stable for day to day use, or I'm a better off sticking with stock for a bit longer?

Hi David - I put in r321 yesterday, looks like I'm having same issue with WiFi. Also the interface became really slow. I know you are aware - just reporting in! Thanks for all the help here.

In order to jump back to r221 - How do I use that "-f" option? Do I have to SSH to the router in order to do that? Kind of a NOOB at Linux..

Paul

(Last edited by cluprogram on 3 Dec 2016, 22:08)

@cuprogram

Thanks for the feedback.  I will be posting a new image a little later if you want to wait, but yes, sysupgrade -F /tmp/imagefilename.bin

To get it over to the router use scp
# scp "imagefilename.bin" root@192.168.1.1:/tmp

If you want to use a gui, download winscp for windows.

Hello just wondered will it be ok to do an upgrade and keep setting with the new version coming