[OpenWrt-Devel] wireless subsystem for next release

[Hauke Mehrtens]

Hi,

I am working on updating mac80211 and the wireless drivers, see
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/staging/hauke.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/mac80211-5.6
This is currently on kernel 5.5, but 5.6 should not be a big problem.

I am not sure how we want to handle this for the next release, I see 4
options:
1. Remove using backports and use the drivers from the Linux kernel
directly.
2. Take backports 5.4.X and continuously update to the latest 5.4 stable
kernel releases.
3. Update backports to a version from kernel 5.6 soon and update it to
new major version till we branch off and then maintain it on the stable,
not long term stable, kernel version at that time.
4. Like option 3, but update at some point in time also the stable
release branch version to the wireless subsystem of the next long term
stable version which should be released in Q4 2020.

I would tend to the last option, then we have a pretty recent wireless
subsystem in our next release, but I do not know if it will be stable
enough.

The wireless subsystem had multiple security vulnerabilities in the last
year which were fixed in the stable releases, we did not care much for
the wireless subsystem shipped in 18.06, but it probably has multiple
known security problems. In 19.07 the wireless subsystem is based on
kerne 4.19 and I will try to update it to the most recent stable version
every few months so we get bug fixes and security updates.

ath11k was added in kernel 5.6, but we can probably also backport it in
some way on our own.

Hauke

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