lede-ar71xx-optimized-archer-c7-v2 - TP-Link Archer C7 V2 AC1750 Optimized LEDE Firmware

There's a patch to enable Qualcomm FastPath in LEDE, this offloads simpler TCP and UDP traffic from the Kernel stack and gets me 960Mbps LAN to WAN on a Netgear R7800

For some years, OpenWrt has arguably
been the most active router-oriented distribution.
Things changed in May of last year, though, when a group of OpenWrt
developers split off to form the competing
LEDE project. While the LEDE
developers have been busy, the project has yet to make its first release.
That situation is about to change, though, as evidenced by the LEDE v17.01.0-rc1 release candidate, which
came out on February 1.

A review/rant about the progress that free software wireless drivers (especially on Linux) have made over the recent years, as well as the current challenges that driver developers (and users) are facing. Felix Fietkau

You seem to imply the router you chose (Archer C7) only makes use of the ath9k driver, which is not the case for the 5GHz bands. Atheros 802.11ac chipsets use a driver (misleadingly) named ath10k. Ath10k is not a driver that has evolved from ath9k as the name suggests, it's a very different driver that needs a binary blob to work properly.

As a result, some of ath9k's makewififast patches cannot be implemented in ath10k. Some TP-Link routers use Atheros 802.11n chipsets and therefore ath9k exclusively. For those wanting to have a completely FOSS router with LEDE, I would recommend the model TL-WDR3600.