How to build Gargoyle with latest drivers

[Tetedi]

I'd like to build Gargoyle (master or 1.12) with the newest mt76 driver version available (which is 9 hours old at the moment). How do I go about it?

[Lantis]

1.12 is based on the 18.06 OpenWrt branch which has not had an update to mt76 since March. It would not be an insignificant effort to backport the driver that far, and if you're asking where to start, I'm sorry to say but you're not capable.

A much more achievable goal would be to try backporting it into 1.13 which is based on OpenWrt 19.07. mt76 was last updated 2 days ago, so any further updates are likely trivial and much easier to apply. And if you wait long enough they will probably happen automatically.

How to do it?
Make sure you can build a regular Gargoyle 1.13 (master) build without any issues.
Then modify to suit the newest mt76. To find out how to do that examine the last time someone else did it to find out what to do.
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/open ... 8034877c9b
Looks simple enough.
You'll need to create this as a Gargoyle level patch as the build root will get overwritten by the Gargoyle build process and you don't want to manually patch it every time. Examples are in patches-generic.

[Tetedi]

I believe 18.06 had the last mt76 update on June 6 2019 and 19.07 on March 10 2020.

[Lantis]

Whoops, reading these while half asleep. Yes that is right, it was OpenWrt master which was updated 2 days ago.
In any case, what i've said hasn't changed. The further you backport something, the higher the chance that other components will need updating as well, and you can quickly end up in a nightmare of dependencies which eliminates the usefulness of the exercise.

Try it, see what happens.