Re:OpenWrt 21.02.0 Released
by bubblethink on Saturday September 04, 2021 @10:53PM
(#28421297)
Wifi will always be hit or miss with Openwrt. The general advice is to use openwrt for routing and a separate access point that runs vendor firmware for wifi. Should you want everything in one device, R7800 is a well supported openwrt all-in-one device.
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I have two Ubiquiti AP-AC Pro APs, and I've been running OpenWRT just fine on them for the past year and a half. Completely rock solid. I didn't do performance testing with the stock firmware, so I don't know if I get the same WiFi speeds, but what I do get is more than sufficient for my purposes.
Maybe other hardware doesn't work as well, but I think if you choose carefully, it's fine.
Wifi is only hit or miss because it's often difficult or impossible to tell when a vendor has silently swapped out the guts of a model and replaced them with Broadcom parts.
How does dd-wrt pull it off, then?
(As far as I know:) By sticking to the Vendor-supplied SDK kernel version, with ancient blobbed up 3.X Linux kernels, for architectures, where modern kernel/module/userspace (source) is not available.
Openwrt aims for "near-mainline" blob-free kernel, currently on 5.4, with 5.10 in current master for many architectures.