Linksys WRT-1900ACS - Experience with DD-WRT, OpenWRT buiilds?

[Cantenna]

Hey guys, I'm new to the forum. Long time tomato, DD-WRT and openwrt user. I recently bought a wrt1200ac router and then a week later I returned it and picked up a wrt1900acs for 35 bucks more. I'm seeing some negativity towards wrt1900acs... Anyone care to comment for me on their user experience using latest Kong DD-WRT fw on this router, what about OpenWRT-davids build?

 

[sfx2000]

DD-WRT seems to work pretty well, there's a couple of private builds outside of the main release that incorporate some updated Marvell drivers...

OpenWRT is working, but I would consider still work in progress (they're on a much newer kernel, and some of the Armada 385 features aren't complete yet).

 

[Cantenna]

DD-WRT seems to work pretty well, there's a couple of private builds outside of the main release that incorporate some updated Marvell drivers...

OpenWRT is working, but I would consider still work in progress (they're on a much newer kernel, and some of the Armada 385 features aren't complete yet).

Thank you sir. I am interested in the private builds you speak of, can you kindly help direct me to where I can find those?

I was under the impression Kong's March 25 build included the updated Marvell drivers for some reason?

 

[sfx2000]

Kong's build for DD-WRT is the one of interest...

 

[Cantenna]

The March 25 Kong build is the best dd-wrt experience in terms of stability I have ever experienced. When I bought the router my intention was to stick to openwrt but I had a couple of bugs that made me look at dd-wrt, glad I did! Does Kong update fw monthly? I see his last build was March 25, anyone know what thread I have to follow to keep abreast of change long and etc for this router?

 

[sfx2000]

anyone know what thread I have to follow to keep abreast of change long and etc for this router?

Monitor the forum over on DD-WRT - fairly active there.

Between Kaloz on OpenWRT, and Kong's DDWRT builds, the WRT1900/WRT1200 are getting fairly sorted... and much better than the factory Linksys firmware...

 

[Cantenna]

Great!

 

[sfx2000]

What's your experience been with Kaloz on openwrt, wasn't even aware of that developer?

https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt1900ac

Lot's of OpenWRT info there - they've got the V1 pretty much sorted, and they're getting the marvell chip in the v2/ACS/1200ac sorted...

There's still outstanding issues with the Marvell drivers that are common across all of this family -- the marvell dumps seem to fix things, and have regressions on others..

 

[RogerSC]

The March 25 Kong build is the best dd-wrt experience in terms of stability I have ever experienced. When I bought the router my intention was to stick to openwrt but I had a couple of bugs that made me look at dd-wrt, glad I did! Does Kong update fw monthly? I see his last build was March 25, anyone know what thread I have to follow to keep abreast of change long and etc for this router?

As you will or have seen by reading the dd-wrt forum for the WRT1900AC:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewto...&start=0&sid=a80c04087e00b1bff8d823d1044473b3

there are some problems with the Marvell wireless driver that Kong is waiting for Marvell to fix. I doubt that he will put out another build until there's a new version of the wireless driver available, and your guess is good as anyone else's about when that will be.

Another place to look is here:

https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/commits/master

which are Kaloz' commits to the wireless driver, and here is the list of issues for the wireless driver:

https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues

There's a bunch of unresolved issues out there in the open source wireless driver (most, if not all, are not present in the wireless driver in the stock firmware), and it isn't clear how many of them will ever be fixed. I see some excessive internet latencies on my iPad Air 2 and Nexus 6P, so I'm one of the people that's affected by the extra latencies that are not in the stock firmware wireless driver.

You'll find that you can subscribe to the mailing list for the wireless driver issues via git. It's interesting to see the conversations there, too.

Not a happy picture. I've been following this for over 2 years now, and these open source wireless driver problems should all have been put to rest a long time ago.

 

[Rookie]

Does the wireless driver issue affect progress for the WRT1200AC as well?

 

[sfx2000]

Does the wireless driver issue affect progress for the WRT1200AC as well?

yes, it is the same chipset, just two less radios

 

[RogerSC]

Was just reading the git wireless driver issues email list, and saw some comments on a fix for the wireless client latencies. I'll have to see that fix in actual firmware, but the Marvell guy sounded convinced that he had fixed this. However, he also said that he hadn't experienced the problem, so this is a theoretical fix on his part, a sketchy thing to hang one's hat on. I don't have a lot of confidence in theoretical fixes, myself, I have to see them actually work. A lot of times, when one fix is applied that's "sure to fix the problem" without the ability to test the fix, a secondary effect or an unanticipated addtional problem will come up. When fixing bugs, there's no substitute for being able to reproduce the problem in the lab.

So we'll see how things look when this theoretical fix comes out in some firmware.