Multiple radios/single phy - should the wiphy struct radios[] be set?

[Jeff Johnson]

On 4/21/2026 6:35 AM, Adam Hill wrote:
> I've been trying to get a WCN6856 card working as an AP on OpenWrt (
> but using a custom kernel and build ) and was hitting a brick wall
> getting DBDC to work. I was starting from almost zero knowledge of
> Linux WiFi in general which made it harder ( and means I might be
> barking up the wrong tree ) - however, it seems that OpenWrt ( at
> least ) relies on netlink returning a radio array to detect devices
> that have multiple radios on a single phy, which doesn't seem
> unreasonable to me.
> 
> I've hacked my OpenWrt build to assume that num_channels = 2 on a
> second interface combination is the same thing ( which is what ath11k
> seems to do when support_dual_stations is true) and confirmed that the
> DBDC setup works with this mod. Shouldn't the ath11k driver be changed
> to populate the radio list the same way ath12k does? What I've done
> with OpenWrt is a bit of a hack, and who knows what else relies on
> radios being defined!

The radio array exists to support Wi-Fi 7 Multi-link operation, and since
ath11k doesn't support Wi-Fi 7, it should not populate the radio array.

Also note the WCN series of devices are tailored for mobile station usage, and
the firmware and driver are designed to model the hardware as a single
multi-band radio that is capable of concurrent operation on multiple channels.

If you want to work with OpenWrt then I suggest working with a chipset already
supported by it such as QCN9074.

I'll let Baochen add any additional observations.

/jeff