5 ms·

Are there any open-source friendly Wifi 6e routers or PCIe cards that support AP mode? The last I looked, the Intel 6e wifi cards did not work in AP mode, so b

Are there any open-source friendly Wifi 6e routers or PCIe cards that support AP mode? The last I looked, the Intel 6e wifi cards did not work in AP mode, so building one was not an option. And sorting through the OpenWRT supported routers and trying to correspond that to 6e models from https://www.wi-fi.org/product-finder-results?sort_by=certified&sort_order=desc&categories=4&certifications=1275,1335 https://www.wi-fi.org/product-finder-results?sort_by=certifi... is rather challenging. Especially since vendors re-cycle model numbers..

alufers 5y ago
I have two Totolink X5000R and they work great with OpenWRT, using iperf3 I can get about 500Mbps of real throughput to my Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus 5G. I bought them mainly with the intent of using them with the Oculus Quest for AirLink and WiFi performance is never a problem for me. Two weird caveats I had to overcome: 1. I had to compile OpenWRT from master myself so that I could configure the WiFi 6 interface using Luci (the web ui), because the latest stable release does not include that functionality. 2. I bought two of them for two floors and OpenWRT somehow managed to generate the same BSSID for both of those routers, which caused both of the networks to be inoperable. To fix this I had to edit a bash script which generates the BSSID in OpenWRT and change it to something else.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Totolink X5000R is only 6 not 6e.
zamadatix 5y ago
Using the OpenWRT site results in a much better search experiance, some useful pre-defined filters are also available there: https://openwrt.org/toh/views/start https://openwrt.org/toh/views/start But the short answer for routers with OpenWRT 6E support is no. For m.2 6 GHz capable cards that have Linux drivers and support AP mode I know Qualcomm has a few models that fit that bill, in general just search any tri-band module from them and you should be set. Broadcom probably does as well but I'm not as familiar with those. I passed dying on this hill long ago though. Even if you get such a card, get it working, and avoid bugs you're still going to be loading binary firmware to it. A much easier way to achieve the same level of openness is to buy a well supported router with AP mode and a properly designed antenna pattern then hanging that off a port on your open router; filtering any packets that source from the management MAC of the AP to completely isolate it.
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  > filtering any packets that source from the management MAC of the AP to completely isolate it. Yeah but you're still trusting the black box to (a) implement security (WPA) correctly and (b) not get hacked and spew out packets onto the wired interface with forged MAC addresses claiming to be from your laptop's wifi card. I've run into this problem before and currently I'm leaning towards just doing wide-open no security 802.11 with nothing-but-wireguard-packets firewalls on both ends of the wireless link. Basically s/wpa/wireguard/g.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    Blocking the MAC in this case wasn't to stop some elite hacker from pwning you from the bushes outside your window it was to stop the system's default phone home type garbage from working. That said if "attacking your adapter's/router's firmware flaws for an encryption/authentication vulnerability so they can hack in enough device control to fake being a valid client and further hack you from that launch point" is a real enough concern for you to be worried about then my first recommendation would be to stop using Wi-Fi in the first place, the entire design of the discovery and advertisement portion of the protocol is the anti-thesis to what you need. However if you really think you can outdo everybody else by ground up building your own Wi-Fi system then a secure tunnel like wireguard or IPsec or so on will at least provide you a second layer that'd need to be attacked. That said such a layer is probably good for you in this case regardless and I'm not sure why you'd replace WPA* instead of use it as yet another layer of protection.
    - octoberfranklin 5y ago
      > I'm not sure why you'd replace WPA* instead of use it as yet another layer of protection. Have you spent any time reading the source code of wpa_supplicant? I still have nightmares from that.
      - R0b0t1 5y ago
        Wait till you see how bad embedded code is. I bet most modems on the market are hackable even when nominally offline. We saw this with the ESP32.
pabs3 5y ago
Only ancient WiFi chips have libre/open firmware. There might be some modern routers with a libre OS but proprietary WiFi firmware though. https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  Not entirely true, you can get ath9k_htc cards that will do 300mbit/sec 802.11a on both the 5ghz and 2.4ghz bands. You have to look hard. It's basically only Atheros 9280 that can do all that with FOSS firmware. You also have to make sure the device has TWO RF front end chips (one for each band). Just looking for "AR9280" will get you a lot of single-band products. There are also devices with that chip plus an AR7010, which is a nifty little USB-to-PCie bridge so the whole thing fits on a USB stick, like this: https://deviwiki.com/wiki/Sony_UWA-BR100 https://deviwiki.com/wiki/Sony_UWA-BR100
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    The AR9280 is 13 years old, closer to the initial 802.11 Wi-Fi standard released in 1997 than now. The thing is the definition of only ancient Wi-Fi chips having libre/open firmware. Also I think you meant 802.11n, while the card does support 802.11a that is 54 Mbps on 5 GHz only.
    - octoberfranklin 5y ago
      wlx00a096****** IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"XXXXXXXX" Mode:Managed Frequency:5.18 GHz Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Bit Rate=300 Mb/s Tx-Power=30 dBm Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-31 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 > The AR9280 is 13 years old They don't have an expiration date, you know. We aren't talking about fruit here. And yes, like everybody on planet earth other than the IEEE -- including the people at Qualcomm/Atheros who wrote the source code for my wifi card's firmware -- use "a" to mean "5ghz band". People need to abandon this silly crusade to insist that "5ghz band" does not have an 802.11 designator, as if it is a feature with no name or something.
ziml77 5y ago
There doesn't seem to be many WiFi 6e products at all. I was looking a few days ago because I wanted to replace the Ubiquiti stuff in my setup due to the lawsuit they filed. There wasn't much that came up in my searches for WiFi 6e APs. And expanding that to include routers as well gave me a couple more options but at an absurd price.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I found the same as of a couple months ago, ended up going with one of the expensive options. Where I'm at in the apartment complex even 5 GHz is overcrowded to the point of degradation regardless of channel so I really wanted to make the jump. Now that I did on all my devices I still haven't seen a single other 6 GHz BSSID in the area despite trying to find one. I suspect Wi-Fi 7 will be more common. Wi-Fi 6E was great but unless you're one of the rare consumers that is going to replace every client chip you can to gain use out of that 3rd band it's identical to the Wi-Fi 6 equipment many just recently upgraded to. Wi-Fi 7 will have the benefit of some phones/laptops already being 6 GHz capable at launch (even if only 6E devices at first) as well as being a general improvement and farther apart for most in their upgrade cycles.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    Crowded 2.4 and 5GHz is exactly why I was looking at the 6E options. But it's not bad enough that it's worth putting a lot into WiFi 6E. I can connect with an ethernet cable if I'm transferring a lot of data or need to ensure a reliable connection.
- silisili 5y ago
  They exist, but there doesn't seem to be a great reason to grab one yet. Companies have added the 6ghz band but not more capacity...so before you may have had 2 5ghz antennas...one for backhaul and one for clients...now you have to choose whether you want backhaul or clients on a particular frequency, and both are suboptimal. I'd recommend just buying a nice wifi 6 system that puts clients and backhaul both on 5ghz. I routinely pull 500mbps from a satellite on a wifi 6 mesh network(asus xt8), I don't see much need to upgrade.
zokier 5y ago
I'd say ath11k is your best bet. Maybe qcn9074 or something similar?
post-factum 5y ago
I use this: 01:00.0 Unclassified device [0002]: MEDIATEK Corp. MT7915E 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter Bought from here: [1] Works with no hassle as AP under stock Linux kernel. [1] https://www.asiarf.com/shop/wifi-wlan/wifi_mini_pcie/wifi6-4t4r-dual-bands-selectable-mpcie-card-ieee802-11ax-ac-a-b-g-n-2-4g-5ghz-aw7915-np1/ https://www.asiarf.com/shop/wifi-wlan/wifi_mini_pcie/wifi6-4...
matheweis 5y ago
This is likely a side effect of the FCC rules that requires devices to prevent software modifications that adjust the rf power. Although this could conceivably be open source friendly with such controls only on the radio software, so far manufacturers have responded by simply locking down the devices. As a prime example, ASUS merlin is actually open source and compatible with a number of WiFi 6 routers: https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng However, directly in response to the FCC rules, ASUS has restricted the ability of end users to havk on their own devices, giving only one person the ability to publish signed builds.

alufers 5y ago

I have two Totolink X5000R and they work great with OpenWRT, using iperf3 I can get about 500Mbps of real throughput to my Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus 5G. I bought them mainly with the intent of using them with the Oculus Quest for AirLink and WiFi performance is never a problem for me. Two weird caveats I had to overcome: 1. I had to compile OpenWRT from master myself so that I could configure the WiFi 6 interface using Luci (the web ui), because the latest stable release does not include that functionality. 2. I bought two of them for two floors and OpenWRT somehow managed to generate the same BSSID for both of those routers, which caused both of the networks to be inoperable. To fix this I had to edit a bash script which generates the BSSID in OpenWRT and change it to something else.

zamadatix 5y ago
Totolink X5000R is only 6 not 6e.

zamadatix 5y ago

Using the OpenWRT site results in a much better search experiance, some useful pre-defined filters are also available there: https://openwrt.org/toh/views/start https://openwrt.org/toh/views/start But the short answer for routers with OpenWRT 6E support is no. For m.2 6 GHz capable cards that have Linux drivers and support AP mode I know Qualcomm has a few models that fit that bill, in general just search any tri-band module from them and you should be set. Broadcom probably does as well but I'm not as familiar with those. I passed dying on this hill long ago though. Even if you get such a card, get it working, and avoid bugs you're still going to be loading binary firmware to it. A much easier way to achieve the same level of openness is to buy a well supported router with AP mode and a properly designed antenna pattern then hanging that off a port on your open router; filtering any packets that source from the management MAC of the AP to completely isolate it.

octoberfranklin 5y ago
> filtering any packets that source from the management MAC of the AP to completely isolate it. Yeah but you're still trusting the black box to (a) implement security (WPA) correctly and (b) not get hacked and spew out packets onto the wired interface with forged MAC addresses claiming to be from your laptop's wifi card. I've run into this problem before and currently I'm leaning towards just doing wide-open no security 802.11 with nothing-but-wireguard-packets firewalls on both ends of the wireless link. Basically s/wpa/wireguard/g.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Blocking the MAC in this case wasn't to stop some elite hacker from pwning you from the bushes outside your window it was to stop the system's default phone home type garbage from working. That said if "attacking your adapter's/router's firmware flaws for an encryption/authentication vulnerability so they can hack in enough device control to fake being a valid client and further hack you from that launch point" is a real enough concern for you to be worried about then my first recommendation would be to stop using Wi-Fi in the first place, the entire design of the discovery and advertisement portion of the protocol is the anti-thesis to what you need. However if you really think you can outdo everybody else by ground up building your own Wi-Fi system then a secure tunnel like wireguard or IPsec or so on will at least provide you a second layer that'd need to be attacked. That said such a layer is probably good for you in this case regardless and I'm not sure why you'd replace WPA* instead of use it as yet another layer of protection.
  - octoberfranklin 5y ago
    > I'm not sure why you'd replace WPA* instead of use it as yet another layer of protection. Have you spent any time reading the source code of wpa_supplicant? I still have nightmares from that.
    - R0b0t1 5y ago
      Wait till you see how bad embedded code is. I bet most modems on the market are hackable even when nominally offline. We saw this with the ESP32.

pabs3 5y ago

Only ancient WiFi chips have libre/open firmware. There might be some modern routers with a libre OS but proprietary WiFi firmware though. https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open

octoberfranklin 5y ago
Not entirely true, you can get ath9k_htc cards that will do 300mbit/sec 802.11a on both the 5ghz and 2.4ghz bands. You have to look hard. It's basically only Atheros 9280 that can do all that with FOSS firmware. You also have to make sure the device has TWO RF front end chips (one for each band). Just looking for "AR9280" will get you a lot of single-band products. There are also devices with that chip plus an AR7010, which is a nifty little USB-to-PCie bridge so the whole thing fits on a USB stick, like this: https://deviwiki.com/wiki/Sony_UWA-BR100 https://deviwiki.com/wiki/Sony_UWA-BR100
- zamadatix 5y ago
  The AR9280 is 13 years old, closer to the initial 802.11 Wi-Fi standard released in 1997 than now. The thing is the definition of only ancient Wi-Fi chips having libre/open firmware. Also I think you meant 802.11n, while the card does support 802.11a that is 54 Mbps on 5 GHz only.
  - octoberfranklin 5y ago
    wlx00a096****** IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"XXXXXXXX" Mode:Managed Frequency:5.18 GHz Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX Bit Rate=300 Mb/s Tx-Power=30 dBm Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-31 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 > The AR9280 is 13 years old They don't have an expiration date, you know. We aren't talking about fruit here. And yes, like everybody on planet earth other than the IEEE -- including the people at Qualcomm/Atheros who wrote the source code for my wifi card's firmware -- use "a" to mean "5ghz band". People need to abandon this silly crusade to insist that "5ghz band" does not have an 802.11 designator, as if it is a feature with no name or something.

ziml77 5y ago

There doesn't seem to be many WiFi 6e products at all. I was looking a few days ago because I wanted to replace the Ubiquiti stuff in my setup due to the lawsuit they filed. There wasn't much that came up in my searches for WiFi 6e APs. And expanding that to include routers as well gave me a couple more options but at an absurd price.

zamadatix 5y ago
I found the same as of a couple months ago, ended up going with one of the expensive options. Where I'm at in the apartment complex even 5 GHz is overcrowded to the point of degradation regardless of channel so I really wanted to make the jump. Now that I did on all my devices I still haven't seen a single other 6 GHz BSSID in the area despite trying to find one. I suspect Wi-Fi 7 will be more common. Wi-Fi 6E was great but unless you're one of the rare consumers that is going to replace every client chip you can to gain use out of that 3rd band it's identical to the Wi-Fi 6 equipment many just recently upgraded to. Wi-Fi 7 will have the benefit of some phones/laptops already being 6 GHz capable at launch (even if only 6E devices at first) as well as being a general improvement and farther apart for most in their upgrade cycles.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Crowded 2.4 and 5GHz is exactly why I was looking at the 6E options. But it's not bad enough that it's worth putting a lot into WiFi 6E. I can connect with an ethernet cable if I'm transferring a lot of data or need to ensure a reliable connection.
silisili 5y ago
They exist, but there doesn't seem to be a great reason to grab one yet. Companies have added the 6ghz band but not more capacity...so before you may have had 2 5ghz antennas...one for backhaul and one for clients...now you have to choose whether you want backhaul or clients on a particular frequency, and both are suboptimal. I'd recommend just buying a nice wifi 6 system that puts clients and backhaul both on 5ghz. I routinely pull 500mbps from a satellite on a wifi 6 mesh network(asus xt8), I don't see much need to upgrade.

zokier 5y ago

I'd say ath11k is your best bet. Maybe qcn9074 or something similar?

post-factum 5y ago

I use this: 01:00.0 Unclassified device [0002]: MEDIATEK Corp. MT7915E 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter Bought from here: [1] Works with no hassle as AP under stock Linux kernel. [1] https://www.asiarf.com/shop/wifi-wlan/wifi_mini_pcie/wifi6-4t4r-dual-bands-selectable-mpcie-card-ieee802-11ax-ac-a-b-g-n-2-4g-5ghz-aw7915-np1/ https://www.asiarf.com/shop/wifi-wlan/wifi_mini_pcie/wifi6-4...

matheweis 5y ago

This is likely a side effect of the FCC rules that requires devices to prevent software modifications that adjust the rf power. Although this could conceivably be open source friendly with such controls only on the radio software, so far manufacturers have responded by simply locking down the devices. As a prime example, ASUS merlin is actually open source and compatible with a number of WiFi 6 routers: https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng However, directly in response to the FCC rules, ASUS has restricted the ability of end users to havk on their own devices, giving only one person the ability to publish signed builds.