MediaTek MT7921K wifi driver on proxmox?

[julz22x4]

Hi
is it possible to enable the wifi card MediaTek MT7921K on proxmox?

I have a Minisforum HM90 with Proxmox 7.1-8 on Kernel 5.15.7-1 and i want to use my wifi network adapter which is not installed/listed under network.
After i found out which wifi device i have, with:

root@pve:~# lspci -nnk | grep 0280 -A3
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: MEDIATEK Corp. Device [14c3:0608]
        Subsystem: MEDIATEK Corp. Device [14c3:0608]

and some google search that i need to install "firmware-misc-nonfree" that this adapter will work.
but after adding non-free to the sources.list and trying to install this package ... he want to remove proxmox-ve:

root@pve:~# apt install firmware-misc-nonfree
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  proxmox-ve pve-firmware pve-kernel-5.13 pve-kernel-5.15
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  firmware-misc-nonfree
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 4 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 8,953 kB of archives.
After this operation, 316 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

so is there something i can do?
thanks in advance

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

the firmwares in pve-firmware do contain the ones from firmware-misc-nonfree (check with `dpkg -L pve-firmware`)
I would really advise against removing the pve-kernel

* is the device listed in `ip link`?
* if not check the output of `journalctl -b` for messages related to the wifi device

else also check out the wiki-page for wifi devices (since most of them cannot be put in a linux-bridge (while in station mode) you usually need to go with a routed setup):
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/WLAN
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#_routed_configuration

I hope this helps!

 

[julz22x4]

* is the device listed in `ip link`?
* if not check the output of `journalctl -b` for messages related to the wifi device

no, nothing in 'ip link'
and all i can find in 'journalctl -b' is

Dec 29 11:43:15 pve kernel: pci 0000:03:00.0: [14c3:0608] type 00 class 0x028000
Dec 29 11:43:15 pve kernel: pci 0000:03:00.0: reg 0x10: [mem 0xe0300000-0xe03fffff 64bit pref]
Dec 29 11:43:15 pve kernel: pci 0000:03:00.0: reg 0x18: [mem 0xe0400000-0xe0403fff 64bit pref]
Dec 29 11:43:15 pve kernel: pci 0000:03:00.0: reg 0x20: [mem 0xe0404000-0xe0404fff 64bit pref]
Dec 29 11:43:15 pve kernel: pci 0000:03:00.0: supports D1 D2
Dec 29 11:43:15 pve kernel: pci 0000:03:00.0: PME# supported from D0 D1 D2 D3hot D3cold
Dec 29 11:43:15 pve kernel: pci 0000:03:00.0: Adding to iommu group 12

if i check 'dpkg -L pve-firmware' ... my adapter is missing:

root@pve:~# dpkg -L pve-firmware | grep mediatek
/lib/firmware/mediatek
/lib/firmware/mediatek/WIFI_MT7961_patch_mcu_1_2_hdr.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/WIFI_RAM_CODE_MT7961_1.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7610e.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7610u.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7615_cr4.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7615_n9.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7615_rom_patch.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7622pr2h.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7650e.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7663_n9_rebb.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7663_n9_v3.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7663pr2h.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7663pr2h_rebb.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7668pr2h.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7915_rom_patch.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7915_wa.bin
/lib/firmware/mediatek/mt7915_wm.bin
/usr/share/doc/pve-firmware/licenses/LICENCE.mediatek
/usr/share/doc/pve-firmware/licenses/LICENCE.ralink_a_mediatek_company_firmware
root@pve:~#

 

[Dunuin]

The question is if you really need Wifi at all. Like Stoiko Ivanov already said you most likely can't use the wifi interface with your guests anyway if you don't want to setup a complicated NAT/routed configuration. And even if it works then Wifi is more vulnerable and less reliable than ethernet so that servers in general dont use it.

 

[julz22x4]

my naive idea was to use openwrt to create an access point with a vm which has the mediatek device attached via pcie passthrough.
openwrt has the mt7921e driver which i can install. but even with this driver the wifi device is not working.

 

[Dunuin]

You can try that but keep in mind that most wifi chipsets also won't work great as a AP, because they are not designed to handle multiple connections. So the number of clients that could connect to your AP would be very limited. So it might be easier/better to get a cheap 30€ Wifi-Router, flash it with OpenWRT and then connect it to a switch to work as your AP.
But you can read the datasheet of your chipset. Maybe you are lucky and it will support all features a AP would need.

 

[julz22x4]

i already tried. didn't work. i think because my card needs a kernel >= 5.12. OpenWRT is on 5.4.
i think i give this up.

thank you guys!