Configuring the station WiFi without restarting the AP

huntc

Hi there,

Is there a way we can configure the station interface and apply our settings (ssid, password etc) without restarting the AP?

We've built a program that provides a nice UI to our customers for selecting the Omega's station interface, apcli0. We use the same commands as the wifisetup script, including invoking the OpenWrt wifi script to restart radio0. What we find is that the radio is entirely restarted, including the AP (ra0). This is unfortunate as our UI is connected to the AP, which then loses connectivity for several seconds.

There is the wifi reload command, but I'm unsure whether this is sufficient. The OpenWrt documentation is quite lacking on what reload actually does.

Had there been two radio interfaces, say radio0 for the station and radio1 for the AP, then wifi up radio0 would have worked I guess. Unfortunately for us, radio0 hosts both the station and AP interfaces, and this is making the user experience not-so-great.

Thanks for any help.

DocHardinger

Same question here.

crispyoz

@DocHardinger @huntc if you use the standard OpenWrt wifi then you can use ifup and ifdown on the interfaces separately, but if you are using Warp Core then the two interfaces are linked and will go up and down together.

huntc

@crispyoz Thanks! Another case for going with the standard OpenWrt distro it seems!

So, the wifi reload approach won't get us there I assume?

crispyoz

@huntc the wifi command is a script in /sbin, you can see that a reload bounces the interface so if the interfaces are handcuffed together then bouncing one bounces the other.

huntc

@crispyoz Thanks - yes, but I note that the wifi reload doesn't have the drammatic pause effect where the network goes offline for a while. Re-phrasing my question, is wifi reload sufficient for updating Warp's driver with the ssid and credentials?

crispyoz

@huntc @Lazar-Demin is probably the only one who can answer that question since Warp Core is not open source and I can't test as I am not using Warp Core anymore. I look at this from a different perspective. Should I make my product design reliant on Warp Core. The answer I came to myself is a resounding NO! Onion developed Warp Core as the open source MT76xx driver was a flakey mess, which in turn made the Omega WiFi a flakey mess. As time passed, a commercial organisation invested money into the open source MT76xx WiFi and the result has been a reliable and flexible MT76xx driver for OpenWrt. I question why would Onion further develop Warp Core when the standard drivers are reliabe, more flexible and under continued development. so therefore why would I hitch my wagon to component with a questionable future.

I'm not suggesting that it is better to use vanilla OpenWrt, the Onion customised release comes with nice scripts/tools to make the Omega experience very sweet, only that relying on Warp Core might not be the best long term strategy.

Lazar Demin

@huntc As far as I recall, wifi reload will work to update the Warp Core's AP network settings without bringing the whole radio down.
I believe the wifi command needs to be used to update the STA network settings, and it will restart the radio. This is because as @crispyoz mentions, the STA interface is handcuffed to the AP interface.

@crispyoz Agreed. The wifi driver landscape was much harsher back when we made Warp Core. Back then Warp Core outperformed MT76 by a large margin. But I 100% agree that MT76 has continued to evolve and has gotten to a place where it's more flexible and likely more performant.

@crispyoz said in Configuring the station WiFi without restarting the AP:

I'm not suggesting that it is better to use vanilla OpenWrt, the Onion customised release comes with nice scripts/tools to make the Omega experience very sweet, only that relying on Warp Core might not be the best long term strategy.

That's actually a big piece of our OpenWRT 22.03 effort - we want to provide firmware that provides a good experience out of the box and is easy to build on top of.
Part of that is a flexible and performant WiFi driver, so we're moving towards using MT76 while still providing the utilities/tools/configs that make the Omega2 easy to use