Issue with Wifi mt7921au (Netgear A8000 / 6E AXE3000)

[tessharp]

Describe the issue you are experiencing

I am trying to use the Netgear A8000 USB adapter with my Home Assistant OS, but unfortunately it does not work. Issue is that it uses the mt7921au, which I understand works with the mt7921u driver, but needs its VID/PID to be added to the Kernel in versions older than 6.4.

I chose my adapter based on its feature-set and thinking it would not be an issue to add the necessary configuration to the HAOS... but I was wrong.

Links I've been reading to choose the adapter:

• https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/blob/main/home/USB_WiFi_Adapters_that_are_supported_with_Linux_in-kernel_drivers.md
• News: USB WiFi Adapters based on the mt7921au chipset (WiFi 6e) are now available... morrownr/USB-WiFi#87

Note: I'm still running 9.5 because I'm looking to migrate from an old adapter, which no longer works with newer versions of Home Assistant OS, based off the Realtek 8188 chipset

What operating system image do you use?

generic-x86-64 (Generic UEFI capable x86-64 systems)

What version of Home Assistant Operating System is installed?

11.1

Did you upgrade the Operating System.

No

Steps to reproduce the issue

1. Updated Home Assistant OS from 9.5 to 11.1
2. Connected the adapter
3. Checked on the local console with "nmcli device" to see if a "wifi" device would show up
4. No "wifi" devices were available
   ...

Anything in the Supervisor logs that might be useful for us?

None of assistance.

Anything in the Host logs that might be useful for us?

None of assistance.

System information

Hyper-V image with PCI passthrough for USB devices.

Additional information

No response

[sairon]

You can try running this in the root console:

modprobe mt7921u
echo 0846 9060 > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/mt7921u/new_id

That way you should be able to check it on the running system at least. Newer kernels contain bunch of patches for mt7921u and I'm not sure how your card will perform with 6.1, yet adding the support for your device to the driver is just about adding its record to the device table (torvalds/linux@03eb52d), which we can backport.

[tessharp]

Do I do this through the Ash shell at the "login" prompt?

[sairon]

Yes, correct, you must run this command as the root user in HAOS directly.

[tessharp]

I got an error message after updating (to HA OS 10.5 through os update and to HA OS 11.1 through os update --version 11.1)

#10.5
modprobe: FATAL: Module mt7921u not found in directory /lib/modules/6.1.45
#11.1
modprobe: FATAL: Module mt7921u not found in directory /lib/modules/6.1.59

Also went ahead and searched for what drivers are there and found the only file:

ls /lib/modules/6.1.45/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/mediatek/
mt7601u
ls /lib/modules/6.1.45/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/mediatek/mt7601u/
mt7601u.ko

I've looked at a Debian box that I had around (kernel 6.4 though) and I can see a folder for the mt7921 within the mediatek/mt76 folder, which is missing in HA OS. However, I can confirm that this set of drivers is available in the Linux 6.1 GA release.

Tried with the modprobe/echo commands with the mt7601u driver, just in case but it failed with (only on 10.5):

[Timestamp] mt7601u 2-2.4:1.0: Vendor request req:07 off:1000 failed:-110

[sairon]

D'oh, sorry for that, I was looking at a wrong place - that driver is not enabled yet in any of the releases. But a release with bunch of extra WiFi drivers enabled is around the corner, I'll make sure to add a patch with adding A8000 to the device table, so you could try it then.

[tessharp]

no worries, will be looking forward to that release!

[tessharp]

Just tested this again after the holiday break, and unfortunately is still not working for me. Should I expect to use modprobe mt7921u to load the module/driver? Or should I expect for it to be plug-and-play?

Updated to the latest 11.4 HA OS release, where modprobe does work, but nothing happens with nmcli