RT-AC87U - AP mode - Quantenna weirdness

[highwire]

If you look at the system architecture block diagram of the RT-AC87U, the Quantenna SoC / 5GHz radio is basically a second router within the router. There were a few times in the past when the Quantenna SoC crashed on me, some times would try do reboot using BootP with the MAC address of 00:26:86:00:00:00 and fail miserably.

Anyhow, because ASUS broke WAN counts, I have switched my 87U to AP mode and use a new pfSense box to perform routing/firewall/DHCP duties. Here's the strange thing though - the 87U is requesting two IP addresses. The first is for the main LAN MAC address, and the second is for MAC address 00:26:86:00:00:00 ("Quantenna Communications"). I don't know if that means bridging between the Broadcom SoC and the Quantenna SoC is going outside of the 87U, or if it remains inside the 87U. I just think it's weird.

 

[RMerlin]

The reason Quantenna went for that design is for simpler integration into existing designs. The Quantenna CPU + radio sits on either the PCI-E or the RGMII bus, and runs its own firmware, so very little changes are required to the "main" router firmware. All settings are handled over RPC or a raw socket, through an API library (which is fully open-sourced BTW).

Otherwise, Quantenna would be forced to come up with a complete solution, including a reference firmware design that has all the bells & whistles of a typical router firmware, plus a higher-end CPU, etc...

 

[RogueSpear]

I'm running an AC87 in AP mode and noticed the same thing. After messing around for an hour or so I was still baffled. In the end I just relented and went with a static assignment. Another annoyance... no matter what I tried, and I spent most of Sunday on this, I was completely unable to get unit to pair up with an AC3200 in repeater mode. No such issues with either an AC66 or AC68. In fact the primary reason I went to the AC3200 was to get away from all the Quantenna issues. So it is what it is - an AP that I also happen to offload some script chores and SMB server duties to. A little less for the AC3200 to worry about.

Sent from my LG-V500 using Tapatalk