802.11s / BATMAN V Mesh?

Technical Support for Routers
1

Just had the amusement of finding one after another seemingly “official Comfast” stores on Aliexpress. Ended up ordering a couple Comfast CF-953AX units which are said to be supported directly with recent Linux kernels.

At least from what I understand, Apple support for WiFi 6 is recent iPhones, some iPads, and Macs with Apple silicon. 6E support is only a couple of iPads.

I’m going to poke around to see if I can connect it to another WiFi 6 unit. One of the things I’m interested in is if the 2.4 GHz enhancements get me a more reliable link from one building to another here. Though the 5 GHz link is robust in dry weather, this last week of storms in California has shown how much that degrades with rain. The 2.4 GHz link stays up, but isn’t fast enough for our use case.

Has anyone configured these to interoperate with 802.11s and ideally BATMAN V routing?

(I do have hand-configured 802.11s running on my Linksys EA8300s. It is more a question of if there is a good way to configure it without “breaking” the GL.iNet applications.)

Edit:

Is there the equivalent of iw phy phy0 info for the Mediatek devices?

Although I’ve installed the iw-full and iwinfo packages, iw doesn’t seem to see the wireless devices and iwinfo doesn’t supply detailed capability information.

From another device and an ath9k-htc interface, the kind of information I’m used to seeing is

jeff@front:~$ iw phy phy3 info
Wiphy phy3
	wiphy index: 3
	max # scan SSIDs: 4
	max scan IEs length: 2257 bytes
	max # sched scan SSIDs: 0
	max # match sets: 0
	Retry short limit: 7
	Retry long limit: 4
	Coverage class: 0 (up to 0m)
	Device supports RSN-IBSS.
	Device supports T-DLS.
	Supported Ciphers:
		* WEP40 (00-0f-ac:1)
		* WEP104 (00-0f-ac:5)
		* TKIP (00-0f-ac:2)
		* CCMP-128 (00-0f-ac:4)
		* CCMP-256 (00-0f-ac:10)
		* GCMP-128 (00-0f-ac:8)
		* GCMP-256 (00-0f-ac:9)
		* CMAC (00-0f-ac:6)
		* CMAC-256 (00-0f-ac:13)
		* GMAC-128 (00-0f-ac:11)
		* GMAC-256 (00-0f-ac:12)
	Available Antennas: TX 0x1 RX 0x1
	Configured Antennas: TX 0x1 RX 0x1
	Supported interface modes:
		 * IBSS
		 * managed
		 * AP
		 * AP/VLAN
		 * monitor
		 * mesh point
		 * P2P-client
		 * P2P-GO
		 * outside context of a BSS
	Band 1:
		Capabilities: 0x116e
[...]
2

It is potentially the case that the drivers don’t support 802.11s

I got my Comfast CF-953AX adapters (MediaTek MT7921AU 802.11acaxbgn). The drivers are upstream in the Linux kernel, from what I understand. NB: These are intended to be station adapters, not APs. They, at least, do not show support for 802.11s from the output of iw. To some extent, this is not surprising as there are few USB adapters that do.

There is still no kmod for 4.2.0 as of the 2023-01-20 build.

Date Compiled: 2023-01-19 13:45:31 (UTC-08:00)

SHA256: 9ea3102b55ee8e976d61d79e67498f68a7391e42fcb36f416f2676edb54d99cf

Edit:

4.2.0 stable also is lacking information in iwinfo, nothing returned from iw, and does not have the kmod-batman-adv module available.

3

Beryl AX uses MTK wifi driver so this should be a problem.