raspberry-pi-pcie-devices VS mwlwifi

Generally yes. M.2 wifi cards are just PCI-E (except for Intel CNVio). Jeff Geerling tried a bunch of different PCI-E cards with the Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module which does expose the PCI-E interface: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/

We're also trying to preserve the utility of older cards by getting at least portions of the drivers working on alternate platforms (like arm64), so they can be repurposed for Plex/Jellyfin transcoding, retro gaming, GPU compute, etc.: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss...

The current answer is maybe: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss...

The PCIe implementation on the 5 is supposedly more complete/less broken than on the CM4, but so far the only person crazy/inspired enough to test hasn't gotten back to this card with their Pi 5 setup.

Just a note that if you're _serious_ about WiFi on the Raspberry Pi... you should use an external WiFi adapter—either PCIe or USB.

With the Compute Module 4, I've successfully tested a variety of adapters [1], from WiFi 6E to older mini PCIe and M.2 cards. There's even a board made for the purpose of multi-WiFi testing, the Seaberry [2].

The Raspberry Pi 5 works with all the PCIe WiFi chips I've tested (haven't had time to summarize testing on pipci database site yet, including a mt7921u-based WiFi 6E USB adapter (haven't written that up, but check out [3]).

[1] https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/#network-cards-nics-and-wifi-...

[2] https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm/seaberry.html

[3] https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/issues/137#issuecomment...

https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com honestly I'd get a home server and run HA through docker, it's gotten me into home servers.

The simplest access you can get would be by using a CM board (as that has PCI Express available on its connectors) but driver issues galore exist. AMD have been more open the the "greenies" but the closest result I have seen is documented by Jeff Geerling

Are you familiar with a YouTuber named Jeff Geerling? He does some pretty far out stuff with pi’s like connecting video cards to them, etc. here’s a videoabout stuff you could do, I haven’t watched it myself. He’s got this website that has a list of accessories he’s tried with the pi. While I was looking for his channel I saw a ton of videos on YouTube for stuff to do with the pi. Curious to see what you end up doing… I guess I’m kinda hoping you do something that utilizes the full potential of the 4 😁

Looks like you're referring to https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues/389

This kind of sums it up https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues/353

It's not openwrt fucking things up mate it.s the wifi drivers for your router they are shit and will never be fixt. Sorry. The drivers are called mwlwifi. YOu can read more about them here: https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/commits/master

The WRT1200AC family is not well supported. The Ethernet part should work fine, but the Wifi is unsupported since some years now, see here the repository: https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi The vendors are not interested in this hardware any more, but they have very good marketing and sales. Linksys and Marvell also did not really support the OpenWrt community, they just had good marketing. If your WRT1200AC device does not work well with OpenWrt do not complain to OpenWrt, but complain to the Linksys support.

The WRT1200AC family for example does not support WPA3, because the closed source Wifi firmware does not support it. The 15 years old WRT54G supports WPA3, it is just very slow. ;-)

Currently I would suggest the Linksys E8450 / Belkin RT3200 (same hardware) or some other device using the current Mediatek platform with MT7622 + MT7915 + MT7531. (2 X Cortex-A53, Wifi 6) All chips are supported in recent upstream Linux kernel, including Wifi. The Mediatek router team is currently doing pretty good upstream open source work for their chips.

Well, not exactly known, but the "WRT3200ACM + WPA3" combination is known to be bad for other reasons. See https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues/389

I'd like to express general caution with upgrading to 21.02 on Linksys WRT-series routers; the Marvell "open-source" firmware isn't truly open source (it has proprietary binary blobs) and development seems to have halted sometime in 2020.

Many users report Wi-Fi connectivity issues[0].

[0] https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues

https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues/391#issuecomment-770244761

Nope. At one point Marvell promised to write firmware that supports 802.11s, but they backed out -- c.f. https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues/127.

Maybe they are not "bad" for what they are, but they are certainly full of bugs https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/issues and most importantly development has been dead for years https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi/commits/master . So if you got one and it works as is (maybe depends on region or luck?) fine I guess, just don't ever expect new features or improvements to that. For someone buying new for OpenWRT I wouldn't recommend getting a dead-end device.