MT7975/MT7976 Driver and Firmware Support

Banana Pi Router design
1

Hello,

I have a few questions about the “MT7986”,“MT7975N”, and “MT7975P” chips used in the Banana Pi R3 (BPI-R3) device:

1 - Open-source driver support for MT7975 and MT7976: I have reviewed the mt76 driver in OpenWrt but noticed that these chips are not directly supported. Is there an officially supported driver for these chips, or is development still in progress?

  1. Firmware files: In the OpenWrt source code, I found firmware files for MT7986 along with some firmware files targeting the MT7975 chip (e.g., mt7986_wm_mt7975.bin, mt7986_rom_patch_mt7975.bin). What exactly are the functions of these firmware files? Which drivers are compatible with them?

  2. Device packages and kmod-mt7986-firmware: In the OpenWrt device packages section, I noticed a reference to “kmod-mt7986-firmware”. What exactly does this configuration represent? Is it limited to loading firmware only, or does it also include driver support for MT7986-based devices?

Additionally, I see the MT7996 driver in the repository, and it appears that a module is being developed for the Banana Pi BPI-R4 that includes MT7996 support. Once this product is released, will it be possible to use this driver with OpenWrt support?

Thank you in advance.

1 Like
2

Mt7986 is the main processor (SoC) which contains wifi-controller…because of this mt76 driver supports this. Mt7975/7976 are wifi frontends (no controller),afaik only for aplifying and maybe wave modification (to reduce noise/interference). These are driven in the wifi driver for mt7986 with specific firmware.

Compared to mt7988, there is no wifi-controller,so external wifi-controller is used on R4 (mt7996) with frontends (MT7995AV + MT7976CN + MT7977IAN on be14 for the 3 bands).