ALFA AWUS036AXML mt7921au usb information #260
Replies: 58 comments 37 replies
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Hi Mike, Thanks for the report. I'll start working the info into the places it needs to go.
This checks with my testing of my cf-951ax. WiFi 6 is working well with OpenWRT 22.04 but Wifi 6e (6 GHz) will likely never work with 22.xx. I periodically check the snapshot and I see things being added to support WiFi 6e but the capability is simply not finished yet. I suspect that the next release of OpenWRT will support 6e.
Same plan here. My mt7921au based adapter lives on my ZyXEL wifi router and provides a WiFi 6, 5 GHz, WPA3 AP on channel 149. This on 22.04 and it works well but I'm sure you get better range than my little adapter with no external antennas. Some questions you could answer that I can add to the review for the axml: Overall impression of quality? |
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Thanks for the input @morrownr, I was hopeful seeing reports of 6ghz working, but didn't realize the weak links on the AP side of things. Seems hostapd hasn't been updated since AC days at all digging up their repos and docs, which is inline with what was said in the openwrt forums in response to myself and others. Seeing that all seems to work at a base level, I'm presuming mac80211 in the kernel is dealing with it well enough, but not sure about AP mode, and how deep the rabbit hole goes for 6ghz. Wifi7 devices are shipping soon, so I have to imagine some vendor or another cares enough to pay for kernel support eventually outside of their own proprietary stacks.
It feels solid, no wiggle in the usb-c port, no shakes/rattles. I'm calling it good after a few weeks of abuse moving about between devices.
Good so far, both with 3.1 or with the usb-c or 3.0 adapter in use. Not always a fan of the adapters (ahem, monoprice), but this feels very solid and not sloppy when in use. The cable feels like silicon sheathing and stiff/solid, as a usb-c should for a doc or such for thunderbolt @ 40gb.
Well, not impressive so far, I just tested at 5ghz AX set to 80mhz from my google pixel 6 pro. and topped out around 230Mbit/s pushing to my server (all 1gig wired), using one client (he.net app) with TCP. Using PingTools I got max at 237Mbit/s transmit, and 212Mbit/s received with TCP, and with UDP a bit higher transmitting at 274Mbit/s max. It was all over the place though, I suspect probably the old broadcom soc in this r7000 isn't the best, but don't have another physical box to test on currently, and something like that is my intended target if not a vm ultimately like you.
None so far, at idle it's ~88.2F on top,~89.2F says the harbor freight temp gun, and up to 92.4F with an iperf running. Iperf3 results: |
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Also one other comment, testing via my Arista C130 AP in AC Wave2 I was pushing ~700Mbit/s with prior tests on this phone, so I know it's just this setup with the mt chip on this old arse router box. |
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Hmm, seems the HE.net app is pretty unstable with iperf contrary to using the PingTools app, I don't get the fluctuation inside longer TCP tests, but I do still see some fluction and jitter in longer UDP tests. Watching the CPU, it goes from almost nothing to the mt7921 driver consuming 30-37% of the cpu during iperf runs. I suppose the cpu capabilities might be an issue in use of these, but if I can dig up a box to boot openwrt on and test with a better proc, I will. |
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Mike, That is a lot of good info but before I start moving the information into the product review, let's look at the performance. You seem to be very knowledgeable. Can you run the following and see if the AXML is running in USB3 mode? $ lsusb -t Are you updating the firmware as new versions are coming out? I say this because new versions have been hitting monthly for several months. A lot of work going on there. I did a speed test that includes my little adapter with the mt7921au chipset. On the Main Menu go down to, I think it is the last item. I compared several adapters in 5 GHz AC mode. I'm a little concerned about your slower speeds so maybe we can get to the bottom of it. Last comment for this message: Right now, AP mode in 6 GHz is a challenge. The OpenWRT folks are peddling as fast as they can but this is a BIG deal. They have WPA3 and WiFi 6 working well but we have seen so many BIG additions to the wifi world here in just that last couple of years that it causes fatigue. On the Main Menu, I have an example WiFi 6 hostapd.conf that I say is in beta but it seems solid. That took some time. Look at how complicated it is. While I think hostapd can do WiFi 6e at this point, actually getting the configureation right is still beyond me. We will get there. |
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You were onto something there, all that glitters isn't gold. You're right, I didn't check very hard obviously, but even though it's a blue port labeled as 3.0, it's only coming up in 2.0 mode as an ehci controller... Drat, I suspect this is due to the crap soc on these and poor broadcom support. Dmesg seems to only find an EHCI controller at 2.0 vs. XHCI I'd expect for 3.0. Probably same reason we can't use the wifi nics on these damn boards. Ugh. Well, sorry for that, this is a really bad example to quote about speed I suppose in hindsight. Re: 6ghz, I totally get it, I'm suppose I'm more annoyed vendors don't get involved in open-source solutions in general. When do you ever see a windoze-based router or ap? You don't, but every windoze or mac user has an AP running linux they connect to. I do need to review your page as stated at the effort, I've been rebuilding my network and replacing/upgrading my Arista and getting out of their cloud is one of the final bits since I read about these 2 months ago or so. I've been dealing with linux and almost any unix since the 90's and not afraid to get dirty, but not a dev, more of an network/systems architecture dude anymore to do much more than read code and comments if there's at least anything there of interest. :) Re: Firmware, I actually went digging around mediatek's site for updated firmware, but like most vendors they say a lot, do little useful, and provide downloads even less. I couldn't even find existence of the mt79xx chips on their site anymore. Where do they publish updates outside of their (probably paid) developer networks? Really sucks Proxmox/KVM USB support doesn't work well, at least with these devices. It sorta works, drivers load, I see the SSID, but as soon as I connect and get a 4-way handshake, the vm hard crashes and instantly reboots. I really wanted to run an openwrt vm appliance with 2/3 of these, and while I can feed it the whole usb controller via pcie vfio, I'd rather not steal that from the server as my only outward facing ports. |
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Hi Mike, thanks for the details. I work with Rokland, ALFA's North American distributor and brand partner. If you aren't able to get it to show USB 3 mode on other systems, we are happy to have you send it in to us for inspection to see if it is a unit-specific issue. We can replace it with a new one if it is. |
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Looks like there are some USB 3 related XHCI problems, too. |
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On 2023-05-01 17:25, Mike Butash wrote:
Re: Firmware, I actually went digging around mediatek's site for
updated firmware, but like most vendors they say a lot, do little
useful, and provide downloads even less. I couldn't even find existence
of the mt79xx chips on their site anymore. Where do they publish updates
outside of their (probably paid) developer networks?
#135
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Yup. That would explain your speed. Any possibility of you testing the axml on other systems to rule out a problem with the cable or adapter?
I've been using Linux to one degree or another since about '94. The kids these days would have a stoke if they saw what we had to do to install Linux back then... don't need no stinking installer. I am not a professional software engineer but I like to pretend like I am. I learned FORTRAN on an IBM mainframe a long time ago and have worked with various languages since. I hate C.
Hmmm. that is not how it works in the in-kernel driver world. I go to all this trouble to provide this and a lot of other information at this site (USB-WiFi) and then you run off to Mediatek's site like a Windows user. He he. Okay. I'll hand it to you on a silver platter: Mediatek's kernel.org website: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/mediatek That link is in Main Menu item 1. Mediatek's kernel.org firmware site: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/mediatek That link is in Main Menu item 8. There are also the instructions for which files you need and how to install/upgrade them. The mailing list where you can watch the action: http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-wireless I monitor linux-wireless to keep up with things. You can submit patches You can even report problems but there are guidelines so don't show up with a problem report without knowing the guidelines. It is best to watch for some time to get used to it.
Hopefully the homework I gave you above gets you to the point that you can answer this yourself. What you will find out if you subscribe to and monitor linux-wireless is that you can watch the Mediatek devs work. And if you really need to reach out to them, several posted their email addresses on the Mediatek kernel.org site. Did you know that the mt7921u driver is the first usb wifi driver that was in the kernel before product was even on the market for purchase? |
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Mike, I started moving the review info sans the performance info. That can wait until we sort that out. It seems as if @bjlockie and I ended up with USB3 problems yesterday and my comment was something about the planets being aligned in a way that took USB3 out. Sometimes you just have to admit that sh*t happens and you press on. I sure would like to hear a confirmation that the AXML is working in USB3 mode on another setup. |
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Well, the speed was definitely related to the system wanting to do usb 2.0, which was an ancient netgear r7000 as another box I had floating around at the moment, but it's problematic to begin with I'm finding out. Won't blame the nic for that. I did try connecting this on my main arch desktop, and originally was working yesterday to at least enumerate a wlan0 nic, but no luck getting hostapd to work, throwing a ton of errors related to @morrownr 6ghz config as unknown values, particularly the strings toward the end. I didn't tinker much beyond this yesterday. I was going to tinker with it further today when my system crashed hard, and wouldn't boot at all. I ended up disconnecting my dock in removing things from it (a thinkpad laptop), and finally got it to boot, but now reconnecting that Alfa nic just throws a ton of usb errors. Not sure if the nic is busted or my thunderbolt dock, but all my other devices are working fine so far on other dock ports, and the dock itself with video etc. Let me play with this on some other systems and see what is up, definitely something weird though. |
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Totally get that, I was more expecting to have to gut some windoze drivers for the firmware, but I couldn't even find those, and didn't get around to digging for vendors that otherwise might provide an oem branded driver for more modern firmware. Always shenanigans with this sort of thing... I did update my openwrt firmware with your link to no avail, but that's more openwrt busted, thus trying my desktop above. Going to try this thing too, and if not test with my old laptop running arch on a modern kernel too. I'll try my old backup laptop too for grins, it's on arch too, an older dell without the TB dock weirdness to see how it fares. |
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OK, if you want to send it to me for evaluation, let me know.
From: Mike Butash ***@***.***>
Sent: Wednesday, May 3, 2023 2:32 PM
To: morrownr/USB-WiFi ***@***.***>
Cc: jopdyke ***@***.***>; Comment ***@***.***>
Subject: Re: [morrownr/USB-WiFi] ALFA AWUS036AXML mt7921au usb information (Discussion #260)
Well, the speed was definitely related to the system wanting to do usb 2.0, which was an ancient netgear r7000 as another box I had floating around at the moment, but it's problematic to begin with I'm finding out. Won't blame the nic for that.
I did try connecting this on my main arch desktop, and originally was working yesterday to at least enumerate a wlan0 nic, but no luck getting hostapd to work, throwing a ton of errors related to @morrownr <https://github.com/morrownr> 6ghz config as unknown values, particularly the strings toward the end. I didn't tinker much beyond this yesterday.
I was going to tinker with it further today when my system crashed hard, and wouldn't boot at all. I ended up disconnecting my dock in removing things from it (a thinkpad laptop), and finally got it to boot, but now reconnecting that Alfa nic just throws a ton of usb errors. Not sure if the nic is busted or my thunderbolt dock, but all my other devices are working fine so far on other dock ports, and the dock itself with video etc.
Let me play with this on some other systems and see what is up, definitely something weird though.
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Mike,
I had to take the opportunity to give you a hard time. Beat 'um while they are down. There are some days when a Something to keep in mind is that it takes a lot more than an adapter, driver and firmware to get everything to work I just recently moved my main dev box over to Ubuntu 23.04. I had been on Mint for a few years but given the driver development and testing that I do, I need something does not get long in the tooth like Mint does. As I have been testing it out, I noticed that it is modern as far as things like this go. My OpenWRT router is set to mixed on 5 GHz. When I rolled in with my mt7921au based adapter on the new Ubuntu, blam, WPA3 and it displayed all settings correctly and it connected fast. Ubuntu uses IWD from Intel these days instead of wpa_supplicant. My point here is that some of the problems you are seeing could be the result of things that are dated. You really have to get the current repo and compile some things to get 6 GHz working on distros that are a little dated. Current distros are working well with WPA3 and WiFi 6 but WiFi 6e is still baking. I suspect we will be in good shape by the end of the year. Thanks for the iw list. I'll get it up later today and then you need to do it again with kernel 6.4 as several capabilities are being added. |
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Scarred from the old realtek days, what can I say. I am a jackass though, I started here, went full circle in wanderings and exploration, and ended up right back here. Problems are definitely of my own making, but I realize what is possible, and tend to push boundaries at times. Yes it gets me in trouble, but years later the vendors tend to figure it out with or without me. :) |
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Ok, weirdly I'm starting to think either this Alfa nic fried my dock, or my dock fried it. Odd, but hear me out. So I've been testing this nic between several systems, 1) my proxmox edge server, a supermicro SYS-5018D box, 2) my netgear r7000 router/ap, and 3) my main rig, a thinkpad t15g-g2 with their tb4 dock. Its worked fine on all the above with said issues at a higher layer, but literally today my laptop crashed, and wouldn't boot until I removed my dock with the nic still attached, and all but a keyboard and mouse dongle. It'll boot without, but crashes hard literally at the bootloader for my disk encryption in plymouth. My lenovo dock is dead now, my pc won't boot attached to it, so I fell back to an older tb3 caldigit dock that works and booted fully with my displays. If I reconnect the tb4 port after boot, it works, but kernel goes crazy and lsusb or even journalctl hangs. Fun times. I tried one last thing, connecting the Alfa nic via a built-in usb-c port on the laptop itself after boot, and as soon as I connect it watching dmesg, the kernel throws a ton of usb errors again, and my system starts crashing slowly over a few minutes to be entirely unresponsive that I have to give it a hard 5-second power-off. I removed it, and vehemently tossed the nic across the room, eyeing the brick of the lenovo dock next. Not sure I want to plug either into anything else, ever. Not really sure what happened here, but my day sort of went to hell testing this thing, and rather done. I might see if I get some blue smoke or something out of the r7000 too as I could care less, but this thing seems fried. |
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Ok, so the nic isn't dead entirely, it does work still in my r7000 on the old 5.10 kernel, but my 6.2.5 kernel rig with arch REALLY didn't like it. Not sure how old or not the firmware is that shipped, I hadn't gotten to updating those before all hell broke loose. Let me try some other hardware on different kernels too since it doesn't seem to be frying/fried entirely. |
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Mike, I've had a few adventures with hardware over the years. General rule 1: If you don't smell electrical smoke, the device may not be dead. General rule 2: Not everything works with everything it should. I have a couple of usb wifi adapters that just will not work with certain other things they should work with but they work well in most situations.
Are you talking about the AXML?
If this is the AXML, then that means you are running OpenWRT 22.0x on the r7000 since only the 5.10 kernel in OpenWRT can support the AXML.
I keep a test installation of Manjaro here for testing the drivers I work on but I don't have an installation of arch and I am not very familiar with it. I'm going to guess that Arch is a lot like Debian in that it runs behind the more bleeding edge distros. My lab is not fully set up yet due to a move but I do have one test system that I can use to install Arch if you want me to. Tell me what version to download.
Remember that mt7921u is part of the kernel but the 2 firmware files are not. They are part of the distro. On the Main Menu (the README on the front page) there is a guide to installing/updating the firmware. Be careful to use section 2 as it is for the mt7921au. Section 1 is for the mt7922. |
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Mike, Short follow up: I was testing my AP guide along with my beta What I discovered: The AXML should be purely plug and play on the new RasPiOS as installed. It was Plug and Play on the previous release but required update and upgrade. The new RasPiOS us using kernel 6.1 and has up to date firmware. Now, and here is the point I wanted to make: RasPiOS STILL uses hpstapd 2.9 which does not support WiFi 6 or WiFi 6e. I quickly compiled hostapd 2.11-devel and poof, everything came to life and WiFi 6 works wonderfully in AP mode with WiFi 6. I was getting a WPA3 connection so no need to mess with wpa_supplicant. It appears we are one app away from full WiFi 6 AP support on the RasPiOS. With Debian 12 coming out on June 10, RasPiOS and the rest of the MANY distros based on it can rebase and we should have a level of hostap that supports WiFi 6/6e. You can check your hostapd version as such: $ hostapd -v If the version is earlier than version 2.10, you must upgrade to get WiFi 6/6e. I have a guide to compiling hostap and am planning to put in on USB-WiFi but if you want an advance copy, let me know. Regards, |
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Hi guys. Got this card yesterday and indeed no plug and play on RPi, ended up here after some searching. hostapd is v2.9, so that advance copy would be much appreciated - although - I have no need for AP mode so unclear if this is really needed. Also found this interesting: |
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Anybody (or anybody knowing anybody) specifically using this WiFi USB Adapter with esphome ? I'm having esphome OTA making me pull teeth ... It just never works: Basically the update crashes as soon as upload starts, watchdog keeps triggering, and device is bricked. It does NOT automatically reboot and, once manually reset, sometimes a USB reflash is needed (potentially corrupted memory). I tried to change many build flags, tried with several ESP32-S3 boards, even tried forcing Nothing seems to work so far ... On some Home Assistant Forum Threads / GitHub issues this is related to a "bad connectivity" problem. This was with Alfa AWUS1900 USB-Wifi Adapter (RTL8814AU) with Hostapd + DNSmasq. I was wondering if anybody here had experiences with this Adapter specifically running at 2.4 GHz and specifically on dnsmasq+hostapd with Otherwise feel free to move / I'll create another discussion looking for other adapters that are proven to be working well. |
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I will probably also need some help configuring nftables and/or OPNSense since I just discovered that the OTA flashing issue is due to some network misconfiguration. Is it possible to create another Discussion in this Repository ? Or what's the best way to go forward ? If I turn OFF OPNSense Firewall ( Some schematics to try to outline what I'm trying to do. ESP32 IOT/NOT Devices 172.22.0.0/16 <--> Hostapd/Dnsmasq AP on Rock 5B / Raspberry Pi 2 on 172.22.0.0/16 and 192.168.4.31/20 <--> Main LAN 192.168.0.0/20 <--> Main Gateway (192.168.1.1) <--> Client Devices e.g. 192.168.x.y
But it just has a miserable output between the Desktop Client and the Rock 5B / Raspberry Pi. Possible causes include:
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When I see this question way down in an old thread, my first thought is that you should post a new issue with a title that reflects this issue.
The driver for the rtl8814au is bad. There is no other way to put it. It also appears that Realtek stopped supporting their bad driver 4+ years ago so our only hope if the development of an in-kernel driver. That could happen in the community at some point but do not hold your breathe. My opinion is that you will be better off working with something with a better driver and the Fenvi might solve many of your problems. |
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Actually it started working now with Alfa AWUS1900 USB-Wifi Adapter (RTL8814AU) ... The issue was a lack of Static Routing on the Ubuntu Desktop client or pushed by the DHCP Server to the clients. I made this small tool based on a gist and some Web Browser Calculators I found online for RFC3442 DHCP Option 121: https://github.com/luckylinux/rfc3442-dhcp-option-121 Although the nftables setup on the Raspberry Pi / Rock 5B needs to be done. I think right now it's an open door. But OTA finally started to work. |
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Don't like this. You are going back to a 20+ year old techology that is probably not tested much. You know you aren't using this given your current configuration? Here is the ht capability of your Fenvi: (I'm not saying you have to use it, rather here it) mt7921au (HT capabilities 0x9ff)ht_capab=[LDPC][HT40+][HT40-][GF][SHORT-GI-20][SHORT-GI-40][TX-STBC][RX-STBC1][MAX-AMSDU-7935] I don't agree with this. I think you are better off using n... Disable 802.11n supportieee80211n=0 I don't like this. It limited you to g. Please turn it on and allow n. I think you should get rid of TKIP Pairwise cipher for WPA (v1) (default: TKIP)wpa_pairwise=TKIP CCMP I have a sample hostapd.conf up for the mt7921au chip: https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/blob/main/home/AP_Mode/hostapd-WiFi6.conf It is for WiFi 6 and the 5 GHz band but you might get some ideas. Overall, I really think you need to concentrate on 80211n if that is an option because it is still tested and will likely result in fewer incompatibilities. |
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My feeling was that it was better to lock it down to "slow" modes since it's only for Internet-of-Things / Network-of-Things Devices. So stability is more important than Speed. Of course I can take it 10 years into the Future if that improves things. I originally had to limit this in order to enhance Stability of the Alfa Adapter with this Realtek Chipset (and even then it didn't help that much). What about the Gree+ HVAC that keeps connecting every 60 seconds ? What about the RADIUS messages ? |
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It looks like the client is just going away for a bit, then comes back, so who knows what the dubious firmware in their wifi device is doing. Probably just a little esp chip or like talking serial to something, I'd say it's probably just restarting on some sort of weird timer if very regular. Maybe they found it destabilizes if running more than 5 minutes, so they reboot it once a minute to be sure. Time to rip the ac cover off and find the ttl port.
Radius accounting is just part of standard wireless notifications, doesn't have to use radius, but if you had a radius accounting server to receive those, you'd configure it and it would transmit those alerts via radius accounting port. In other words, don't worry about it, it's just system logging. |
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@morrownr Actually I think I will try to adapt my Configuration based on your Suggestions. Just NOT on the Production Version (for now at least). I'll just have a Raspberry Pi 3/4 + another Fenvi (I currently have 2 other laying around: bought 4 since they were so cheap 😆) in my Living Room, then play around with the Settings. I also need to investigate why a damn ESPHome ESP32-S3 Device would reboot IMMEDIATELY after WiFi connection was lost. ESPHome Community tells me that should not happen ... Well, maybe it's not a Reboot but a Freeze/Hang + Watchdog activation + Crash + Reboot, but in the end, that causes my Solar Inverter to trip. That's why I'm not keen on doing this in Production. On the other Hand, as I said, I can dedicate another SBC (I might use a second Rock 5B in order to reduce the number of Variables in fact) + Fenvi + M5Stack ESP32-S3 Atom S3 Lite with the same Software hooked up via USB and with Serial Logging enabled. Restart WiFi and see what happens. Between the System Crash / Panic when running Although now, knock on wood, |
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Now it did it again with the Kernel Panic / Freeze ... Maybe I really need to get the Firmware from git 😞 |
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I have an item on the Main Menu about firmware: https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi Go down to item: 7 |
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Yeah I had a look. But you said Debian Releases before Debian Bookworm. And before starting tampering with Files left and right conflicting with Existing Debian Packages, I just attempted to install the Debian Testing Version of the Firmware Package, which is approx. 6 Months newer and I could stick with APT / DEB Packages 👍. And ... knock on wood ... that seems to have solved (or at least made much better) the Issue. |
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I am now also trying to upgrade the Kernel (whilst still staying on the LTS Kernel 6.6.x Branch) from 6.6.19 to 6.6.30. I didn't realize so many things got changed in so little time 😕. Lets see if that improves the situation as well. |
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I can go with stability over speed for this use case but I will argue all day long that n will be more stable than g or b because very few people use them anymore so there is limited testing. In fact, I turn g and b off in all cases that I can.
Good. Making progress. I was not saying use my guide for the networking or the settings in hostapd.conf that are not applicable but rather that there may be some good info in there. I don't have a good handle on your networking setup so I am staying away from that. I have a Rock 4SE that collects dust. A company sent it to me to evaluate. I evaluated and sent in my report. I would use it for something but the company that makes the Rock SBC's does not do a good just supporting an os for their boards. Have you thought about maybe Armbian? |
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I know ... the feeling about this **** ARM SBC Mainline Support is just Awful. I have plenty of ODROIDs collecting dust as well. With the Rock 5B I was a bit more lucky: https://github.com/luckylinux/rock-5b which I forked from https://github.com/inindev/rock-5b, and that is Mainline Linux Kernel with some Patches added on top. EDIT: for now I settled on Linux 6.6.x Branch since that is LTS (and at the time Linux 6.7.x was NOT supported by ZFS). https://github.com/inindev/rock-5b also didn't update beyond Linux 6.7.x so I don't think I'm missing out by much ... The Rock 4SE seem to use the same RK3399 that my RockPro64 uses. Those are also collecting dust ... Armbian I'm not so sure ... To be honest I prefer running stock Debian personally 👍 . Otherwise from https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Mainlining RK3399 seem to be FULLY supported on Mainline Kernel. Did you test that ? |
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Does ALFA AWUS036AXML mt7921aun supports MAC spoofing? I know that it supports every thing required for WiFi Penetration Testing. But still I would like to know about all the possible issues before I purchase this adapter. Your answers or advice will help a lot. Please feel free to suggest, if there are any other WiFi adpaters better than this adapter. I am regretting my choice by buying cheap TP-Link Archer T2U Plus RTL8821AU (although useful but not supports VIF and Mac Spoofing). |
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Yes, it does: But in any case hcxdumptool is able to retrieve the hardware MAC: A device/driver test is here: Please note: |
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I have enjoyed my axml but don't feel qualified to answer your specific questions. I'll recommend that you ask Zerbea over at his site: https://github.com/ZerBea/hcxdumptool He has an adapter with the same chipset and he does a lot of testing related to monitor mode. However, since you have a rtl8821au based adapter, how about we try to make the best of it. We are trying to get aa in-kernel driver ready to upstream. We need testers: You can read the above thread to see how things are going. In the first message it gives a link to where the driver is located. Be glad to have you test and report. |
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@morrownr Thanks for reply. |
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Opps... my reply was addressed to the wrong person. Want to test a new driver with your 8821au based adapter while you shop for the axml? |
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Yes, I would like to test the new driver. I would like to know whether issue related to active monitor mode in mt7921au chipset (ALFA Awus036axml) is kernel, hardware or driver based. Thanks. |
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I am pretty sure it is the driver that is the problem. The reason I say this is because the mt7610u and mt7612u drivers both support Active Monitor mode and it is working well. The mt7921u driver says it supports Active Monitor Mode so the intent of the devs is that it works but bugs happen. You might want to check this with Zerbea as I mentioned above. It might be time for one of us to post a bug in linux-wireless which is the beehive of Linux wireless development. I know the Mediatek devs have been really busy for a considerable amount of time as new products have had their attention. Mediatek has a lot of chips that are basically Linux only and with the rollout of the new WiFi 7 chips, the situation is one of prioritizing the most important project at the time. They have support for the new mt7925 WiFi 7 chip in the kernel but not yet for the new mt7927. This issue is actually one where it would be great if someone in the community could investigate and propose a patch. We need testers for the rtl8821/11au project that is underway. The thread where we are coordinating issues is: You just need to read the thread to see where we are. The driver is actually in good shape. The first message gives the link to the repo where we are working the code. The intention is for this driver to go into the kernel. My testing of monitor mode shows good results but Active Monitor Mode is not yet supported. In fact, I am not aware of any Realtek drivers that do support it. If your need for Active Monitor mode is immediate, you might consider the Alfa achm or acm adapters. I have both and they are good adapters, not to mention they are lower cost. |
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I just noticed that Zerbea answered your question about MAC spoofing above. Glad he showed up... my own specialty is more in AP mode so I gladly step aside and let the monitor mode experts work those questions. Looking forward to seeing you test the rtl8821/11au driver. |
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⁷I use TP-Link WR902AC travelrouter v3 with OpenWrt 22.03.7 using a customized installation that includes kmod-mt7921u. I use Alfa AWUS036XAML USB 3.0 adapter on the USB 2.0 port on that router. The 2 build-in radios are configured as follows: radio1: Master mode on channel 36, ssid openwrt, 5GHz, country code set, security set. This is used to login into my router for 2 purposes:
After connecting the Alfa Wifi antenna and switching off/on the router, I get to see radio2 (Alfa) Mediatek with the mt7921 chip. A funny thing happened: radio0 did not show the IP it got from its connection, although behind the scenes it got a ipv4 address from the local wifi 2.4Ghz network. A ? was shown in stead of the ip. When restarting router (on/off) without the Alfa attached I see the ipv4 address in the Wireless settings once connected to my local 2.4Ghz wifi network. I have no idea why this happens. A day later i found the solution here: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/relay_configuration The Status → Overview window (image below) shows the final result. radio1 is a DHCP client to the main router. The client Wi-Fi has a ? in the Host column instead of a IP address because its wwan IP address is only visible in the Network Interfaces page. In the image below,radio0 (the access point) had not been configured/enabled yet. But it would show the SSID that you configured for the extender. |
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I had finely on Ubuntu 24.04 the Alfa AWUS036AXML working with Wi-Fi and also Bluetooth on a ThinkCentre PC. Works fine!! I could repeat the above on a second PC (ThinkPad laptop) also with Ubuntu 24.04. Interesting detail: I copied and compared the same named files from different sources:
Not sure if swapping bin had effect. I was not (yet?). I was not able to repeat the results from above i.e. meaning the Alfa AWUS036AXML Bluetooth active on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Bookworm 64bit. The Alfa Wifi however works fine. In all test situations the standaard basic Wifi usage of Alfa 2.4 and 5Ghz on N and AC. |
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Hi @peterstamps Thanks for the report. It is possible that Alfa did a manufacturing refresh on the AXML. I have recently taken the AXML out of the Play and Play List pending me gathering more information. More people than I would like to see have been reporting some problems that I could not duplicate on adapters with the same chip so it was puzzling.
This is good to hear. Some of the Windows users will realize that we are talking about a capability that Windows does not support unless it is very recent. Windows does not support more than one BT chip in a system. One has to be deactivated. However, Linux does support multiple BT chips active.
I would like to know if this works in a USB3 port. You can check if WiFi is USB3 by running the following command: $ lsusb -t BT is a USB2 technology and it was discovered not long after USB3 had settled in that there would be interference problems between the USB3 cables and other parts and BT. If Alfa has figured out how to successfully have WiFi working in USB3 mode and BT working in USB2 mode in the same device without problems, that is great. |
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BTW, in my Firmware guide on the Main Menu, my guidance uses the Official Site for firmware storage for Linux distro use. While you may be able to find firmware files elsewhere, depend on the official site to get it right. FYI: new files for the mt7921 showed up about 2 days ago. |
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I got bluetooth working on a USB 3.0 port on a UBUNTU 24.04 64bit PC and Laptop with the Alfa AWUS306AXML Wifi and Bluetooth adapter without stuttering or noise, just good quality till about 5 - 6 meters away from the antenna. I got the same positive results on a Raspberry Pi4 with Ubuntu 24.04 installed, however not when Rasberry Pi OS Bookworm 64 bit was installed! Note: The PC had no bluetooth build-in, the Laptop and Raspberry Pi 4 both had and showed both adapters in Blueman Bluetooth Manager application. I did not succeed with Raspberry Pi4 Bookworm 64 bit. Here only Wi-Fi okay, but no bluetooth from the Alfa, only the standaard build-in bluetooth of the Raspberry Pi was visible and working. Below the details/results and how I did it. Lenovo ThinkCentre with Ubuntu 24.04 and on a USB 3.0 the Alfa AWUS036XAML Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapter with the original (shielded?) USB 3.0 cable that comes with this device. MT7921AU（Linux）.tar 1.74MB 2023-04-11 01:46:13 So I ended with:
All other MT7961 files were saved in a backup location. With this set I have achieved the following results Below a snippet from the "sudo lsusb -tv" command showing the mt7921u driver attached to USB 3.0 connection (5000M) /: Bus 001.Port 001: Dev 001, Class=root_hub, Driver=ehci-pci/2p, 480M Below a snippet from the "sudo lshw | grep -A10 -i network" command showing the mt7921u driver attached to USB 3.0 connection and Wireless Interface information *-network Below a snippet from the "sudo lshw" command showing the mt7921u driver attached and Bluetooth wireless interface information Blueman Bluetooth Manager was installed. Blueman is a GTK+ bluetooth management utility for GNOME using bluez D-Bus backend. I was able to play smoothless music with Rhythmbox and listen to it on a Bluetooth enabled Dual Radio which acted as a Music Box :-) Sometimes I used the build-in connection function of Ubuntu itself in stead of Blueman Bluetooth Manager. For example with my Android phone I was not able to keep the connection between my phone and the Blueman application. The pairing was done okay using Blueman, however the connection was a few seconds okay and then automatically it was disconnected. When I retried the Connection with the build-in function it was directly successful. (I mean with Build-in Connect to Bluetooth device, the function at the upperright menu bar corner, where you also shutdown your system and were various settings/functions are available). My cheap Grundig Bluetooth Earphones were working okay but only from a small distance max 2 meter. NOTE: it might be useful to reset all USB ports on your Ubuntu Linux machine! save following script as reset_USBs.sh and mark as executable and run as sudo ./reset_USBs.sh. comment #!/usr/bin/env bash base="/sys/bus/pci/drivers" comment # This might find a sub-set of these: |
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Just wanted to add info on the Alfa AWUS036AXML as requested to add to your info, I just go tone for testing this with openwrt currently, 2.4/5ghz worked fine, however simply no 6ghz support yet unfortunately.
I haven't tested this nic other than base functionality as this was to be my 6ghz AP to add to an existing AC radio setup, but if there's anything else I can answer about this directly in a working fashion I'm glad to.
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2023-05-01
ALFA AWUS036AXML
Maintained by <>
Chipset: mt7921au
hostapd.conf: untested directly
OpenWRT works fine at both 2.4 and 6ghz in physical box (tested on netgear r7000), and virtualbox vm, however not proxmox vm (bad usb support in kvm).
Use of 6ghz does not work in AP mode. This config above allows hostapd to start, but only in 5ghz mode.
Told by owrt devs this is not supported yet in gui or cli.
usb-modeswitch not required. This is a single-state device.
WPA3-SAE: yes
Power requirement: No testing mechanism
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