On the other hand, they would sell it with direct support for real OpenWrt, while many other manufacturers, including FriendlyElec, often publish franken-Linux distros that force users to resort to others such as Armbian and DietPi to be sure their OS doesn't become obsolete and unsupported in a few years.
The difference is that OpenWrt has the entire source code available, and unlike those franken-distros, it is built as vanilla linux + a set of patches. As long as there is enough interest, anyone can rebase these patches on top of a newer mailine kernel. For example some Ubnt XW boards recently got an update to 23.05 after being stuck on 19.07.
I don't feel like it really needs to compete on price though. As long as it's not totally unreasonable, I (and I assume other OpenWRT enthusiasts) would gladly pay a premium for a device that includes truly first class OpenWRT support.
I have been looking for an open source replacement for the Elecom WRH-583BK2-S is there anything in there? It's a W65 x D35 x H20.5 (mm), dual LAN, 802.11ac router.
> GPL compliance: 3b. "Accompany it with a written offer ... to give any third party ... a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code"
I'm guessing it will also be a tag from `git.openwrt.org`, from the same development and release process that continues to support numerous other consumer devices, and keep them up to date.
It might be good to clarify this, since people who've seen a lot of open source projects can imagine ways this could go bad.
I have a very favorable impression of the OpenWrt project, and I'm looking forward to this being a good thing.
I use OpenWRT and what I have wished for is a configuration file as robust and simple as the one for pfSense. Version upgrades amount to a migration headache.
I've been using the attended sysupgrade and I guess I'm lucky that there's no migration needed at all. All settings are preserved.
Also, I think the configuration file is already robust enough; you can edit them using a text editor like vim or edit them using the UI or edit them using the CLI tool. I cannot think of anything to make the configuration file even more robust.
I've experienced this on OpenWrt as well. There's a backup/restore config files button but it's sort of a best-effort type of operation. If you are restoring across many versions and the config files are no longer sane, you will end up with a broken system. But the config files were restored exactly as advertised :)
Thankfully all the config files are plain text and can be manipulated however you like. It is usually not too difficult to take working config while fixing or disusing problematic files.
the turris devices are tinker friendly, feature rich and high quality - and not cheap.
truth be told, the aio router-server embedded thing seems very difficult because peoples expectations vary widely and the whole ids/dpi and media-server stuff gets somewhat more demanding at gigabit speeds than what unoptimized stacks can accomplish with commodity low-power hardware.
I see this as being the Corolla to Turris's Unimog. The Omnia is a sliders-to-the-right dreambox with every possible interface, it has a freakin' SFP slot, three miniPCIe slots, I mean, wow.
As a result, it's capable of 99% of jobs, but it's only the best choice for about 2% of them. For most things, the Omnia is tremendous overkill and nowhere near cost effective. Therefore it suffers low sales volume, and the price never comes down.
This new box might only be capable of 75% of jobs, but it should be a good cost-effective choice for quite a lot of them. It still won't be the cheapest, but it'll be reasonable, and they should sell truckloads of them.
What is the intended purpose of an openwrt banana pi?
I associate openwrt with router firmware/software, so I would expect a lot of ethernet ports (more than two). Or use it as a wifi router/access point, when I only need one port. If I would want to do any networking tricks, I would fall back to a rpi/banana pi, which wouldn't do routing or wifi.
I'm only curious. I have two rpi's in my drawer doing nothing.
That's how basically all consumer routers work: an SoC with about two Ethernet interfaces, at least one but usually both connected to a managed Ethernet switch chip, using separate VLANs for the WAN and LAN ports. Routing both Ethernet ports through the switch chip is usually done so that the switch can do some NAT offload.
1) providing basic networking (default gateway, connection to upstream provider)
2) basic security: firewalling + natting
3) basic network daemons, and "daemons": DNS, DHCP, IPv6 autoconf, and a nice new one: 802.11s ("network mesh": keep wifi at 5 bars by kicking people off their access point if another access point can provide a better connection)
4) more advanced networking stuff: VPN (l3vpn, l2ptp, l2ptmp, mesh vpn), cloud connections/vpns, WAN connections, redundancy (downstream and upstream, l2 and l3, ...)
Personally, OpenWRT doesn't really sell me nowadays as having a ton of value.
For a router, you can feasibly use an off the shelf prosumer device like Unifi, or, more compellingly, an actual robust OS like OpnSense, PfSense, Sophos or Untangle.
As for access point capability, that should really be segmented, and any off the shelf Ruckus, Aruba, Unifi etc. will always outperform the drivers available to OpenWRT. I'm a staunch advocate of an eBay ruckus 510 or 610, which will be very little in terms of cost and also your best home access point ever.
It's nice that it's open source and all, but in terms of raw performance or value-add, I don't see it. Open source for the sake of open source is... well, another discussion.
I agree that OpenWRT isn't absolutely the best, but anything you have mentioned above (prosumer devices like Unifi, or separate APs like Ruckus, Aruba) will cost far more than a simple consumer level combined router-and-AP with OpenWRT.
You probably don't see it because you are used to spending big bucks on your networking equipment whereas most people will spend $50 and then install OpenWRT to wring the most value out of it.
It's not a package deal, but router hardware for Pfsense or OpnSense, or even a Tp link or Unifi device isn't exactly breaking the bank.
It's also vastly superior enough for the Open WRT to not be worth it.
Does OpenWRT appeal to people with a low degree of knowledge, time or skill? Heck no.
The most applicable scenario I can think of is someone who is very knowledgeable and has a lot of time but very little money, but OpenWRT exclusively as a device for people who live in India or Brazil is again not super compelling to *me* as a technological package.
Though I respect conceptually that other people might have different perspectives, I live in a country with an average living standard, so I can't really share it.
OpenWRT enables people to build mesh networks. I helped building some by being part of a Freifunk community and it was a great feeling - you get to tinker around with network stuff and in doing so help others (free wifi for everyone, yay!).
> The most applicable scenario I can think of is someone who is very knowledgeable and has a lot of time but very little money
Yup. That was me as a high school student. Or rather, I wanted to be very knowledge, and did have a lot of time and very little money. OpenWRT was perfect to get started with tinkering with networking.
> As for access point capability, that should really be segmented, and any off the shelf Ruckus, Aruba, Unifi etc. will always outperform the drivers available to OpenWRT. I'm a staunch advocate of an eBay ruckus 510 or 610, which will be very little in terms of cost and also your best home access point ever.
This. Your comments about open source are relevant but IMO these days with work from home, tons of devices, larger/more well constructed homes, increased traffic for anything/everything, etc managed APs are just the way to go.
I'm a big advocate of OpenWRT but many years ago I got sick of fiddling with basic connectivity on a regular basis and dropped a few hundred dollars on a standard Unifi setup. I haven't touched or thought of my "pipes" since - to me there's nothing worse than being deep flow into a project and then having to fiddle with some router or access point because it's being flaky, dropping packets, negotiating slower link speeds, etc. It's much better than factory firmware in most cases but that's a pretty low bar.
Ubiquiti has had some controversies with data access, cloud stuff, etc but I just can't be bothered to care. For $100 x $NUM APs and a docker container to run the controller it just works.
Unifi has been truly game changing for me in terms of making wifi ethernet level reliable, predictable, and consistent - everywhere without needing to take on yet another level of deep expertise in Wifi.
I've used dd-wrt on my home routers in the past -- I bought a pre-flashed linksys router from FlashRouters, a support company affiliated with the project. The router worked fine for a year and then started dropping connections. Then, it took a lot of time for me to debug whether it was a software or hardware issues (it was hardware after all).
To replace it, I saw that Asus routers use a custom wwrt by default. And if you want to truly control it, there's an open source project that lets you adjust it more (Merlin).
I used OpenWRT on an actual Linksys WRT device back in the day. These days I use separate components for my home network: Huawei modem, pfSense router/firewall, Unifi wifi, unmanaged switches. This gives me more control (and more learning opportunity) but obviously I see the benefit of the "all in one" type devices OpenWRT supports in many applications.
Back then I didn't really understand routing etc. and just used OpenWRT as plug and play. But is it actually a good alternative to the above component-based setup when just a single device is desired?
RK3588 can handle 2 2.5G ports. Would bump the price a bit, but also is a significant CPU upgrade so you are likely to get much better usable bandwidth with packet inspection and/or QoS.
That’s a pretty significant jump in complexity, the RK3588 is one of the most powerful SOCs available. A cool part, but I’m not sure it fits the OpenWRT use case
What's the complexity? They start at $70 or so in the RK3588S flavor, it's basically a CPU with a PCIe bus, the software, board complexity, and cost seems just about the same as the proposed OpenWRT solution.
> Mediatek might not be willing to provide their WiFi SoC if you are not using their compute SoC
There are some China-only ZTE devices that do this, but they obviously have a different order volume and scale that makes it possible. (The main SoC is replaced with a ZXIC one, a ZTE subsidiary)
In the first case I'm dubious that MT7981B can handle usefully more than GigE with the usual small packets, firewall rules, anti-buffer bloat, QoS, numerous clients, and related that people expect of a router these days.
Seems to really limit the audience and shorten the useful life of a router to penny pinch. How about a $88 NanoPi with dual 2.5G, 4GB ram, 32GB eMMC, and wifi? Is it really worth $10 to have 1/4th the ram, 1/256th the storage, 1G instead of 2.5G and less CPU[0]?
I got similar with the faster RK3588, 8GB ram, dual 2.5 and 1G, and metal case for $120. I've been quite impressed, it's about half as fast as my xeon E3-1230 from years ago.
WiFi is always a problem with flashing random devices. If they can build a device that has stable WiFi with external antennas, it would be a game changer.
The Linksys E8450/Belkin RT3200 is a solid and affordable router. UBI firmware support, hardware NAT offloading and DSA support for better VLAN performance. Less than perfect WiFi range.
I can make a vote against x86 in a virtualized environment like ProxMox. Setup is just way harder than it needs to be and there are a lot of gotchas.
I’m looking as well. Although now it seems like I should just buy this BPi when it is available. I would like to go back to ARM on my router… just nothing Broadcom!
What is harder? I have a setup just like that. Create VM, use open wrt image as disk Vm, configure some passthrough for the nics and press start?
Updates are as easy as other device (press button on web interface or use openwrt cli)
IMO, owrt runs best on x86 (it’s your usual Linux kernel after all) and you get the best support and performance. You also avoid a lot of all the bugs related to embedded development with custom SoC, internal switch, vlans, flash layout, possibility of brick, bootloader stuff, etc.
More generally, is there a good place to ask these questions? There are several under this post already with different requirements, and I have one too, with different requirements — I just want an edge gateway to route upstream and provide basic local network services (DCHP et al, and will turn off any radios) at low power. OpenWRT's hardware table seems not very useful; I can't, for instance, filter for at least two ethernet ports.
I have very basic requirements: a solid router that runs, and has some free memory. Everytime that I try to find a replacement that has some wide consensus, I fail to find it. My router is now 15 years old... Some people in this thread have suggested Linksys E8450/Belkin RT3200, which aren't available in EU it seems. So, it's not easy. I'll wait 15 more years probably.
Anything with the MT7986B chipset is a good choice, they support Wifi6, have a 2.5G ethernet port, have decent amounts of RAM/flash and mostl importantly have a fast enough CPU to do high speed WAN to LAN routing and firewalling.
NVMe seems like overkill for a router of this level, but in practice getting M.2 drives is a lot easier/cheaper than eMMC. And while microSD can work, it doesn't have the reliability, write durability, and random IO of a 'real' drive.
I might be interested, depending on the power consumption, and on whether or not it has enough resources to run a DNS server (for reasons of ad blocking mostly). Don't particularly care about the price tag, would easily pay twice the target price.
Hopefully you would actually be able to get a full speed transfer between the Ethernet ports; I had to go back to the factory firmware on my router in order to take full advantage of my 1 gigabit Internet connection.
If it was several years ago and on a router that was not too expensive, then there's a good chance it's CPU was still an ancient MIPS core or two, mated to vastly more modern radios. Cheap routers have only recently started moving to ARM cores with enough performance to actually do routing, traffic shaping, etc. at gigabit speeds. There were a ton of routers sold that could only get close to a gigabit of WAN to LAN throughput by offloading NAT to their built-in Ethernet switch.
I'd love to see a 10g version... but it probably doesnt make sense for like 95% of the people, both in terms of specs and finantially (2x price? You probably want 2 10g ports too).
I would have pointed you towards the BPI-R4, but they haven't quite got the accessories around it out the door yet. (Ie. The 802.11be radio add-on card and the case are not available yet)
Would absolutely love to buy this and throw OpenBSD on it. Not all proposed hw appears to be supported yet but if this gains traction then that might be enough of a catalyst.
Bring it with you "home network setup" with devices pre shared keys and only authentication to a portal one time or an Ethernet port. Also let's you share one paid-for connection—on an airplane for example.
Yes, it's mostly support from the Linux Kernel. The Linux kernel driver(s) need to support the Wi-Fi generation and need to support the mode(s) for use as more than a client device.
As others have said, it was probably supposed to read "m.2 2242" which is physically in-between the size of the 2230 drives that the Steam Deck uses and the 2280 ones that most modern desktops and laptops use.
The thread mentions it, it's basically a MediaTek MT7981B with some extra components. It would be interesting if they can get all the things they mention in the < $100 price range that they're aiming for.
I looked at the specs. It's a BananaPi R3 mini with stuff added that nobody will ever use. I can't really find a use for such a device, unless you're the maintainer for some kernel driver used on that board.
Compared to an ordinary router:
1) There's a bit more powerful CPU, barely enough for TOR or wireguard VPN. Doesn't say anything about hardware crypto.
2) There's 1 GB RAM, way too much for basic routing, barely enough for TOR, barely enough to run a webserver, but not both.
3) There's NVME storage as an option, but NVME is too small, too expensive, and MUCH too fast for a NAS with that kind of networking, and there's no USB3 or eSATA to connect external storage such as a large HDD or a DAS.
4) I assume that the wifi chip (only one?) is soldered. If the driver ever becomes unmaintained, like it happend with mwlwifi, you throw the router into the garbage.
5) It doesn't even have a network switch.
6) They plan to load it with various features (serial, USB debug, JTAG (ffs! why??)) that only devs will ever use, and only until they get it booting. No use for all that once it boots reliably.
7) Modbus? Who uses that!? I want mPCIe, GPIOs, I2c, SPI, serial (other than the debug port), RS485, you know... actually useful stuff!
8) And there's RTC on a device that 99.9999% of users will connect to the internet. Why? For the rare situations when it boots after a power failure before the ISP network is up? If it had SPI/I2c out, there are Raspberry Pi RTC modules that could be added for $1.
9) The price: 100$ is waaaay to much for something that's only a micro-router. GL-MT3000 is in the same price category and has USB3.
My ideal router would have:
- 2 GHz 4 core armv8 CPU, or at least 2 core armv7+vfpv3
3: As a consumer, NVME drives are an off the shelf easy to source item. All of the storage cases you specify are better served by a 'full server', even if that is a desktop device running 'x86_64' OpenWRT.
8: RTC is SURPRISINGLY very important for E.G. Initial TLS / HTTPS connections and bootstrapping secure connections. It's also a serious quality of life aspect that doesn't cost that much to add. Surely you've seen the hell caused by Microsoft's attempts to fix this problem wreaking havoc with connection failures.
5: I suspect that was more to fit the form factor of an existing off the shelf case, and dangling a dumb-switch off the internal port is a reasonable option. This is annoying but I understand the reasons and tradeoffs.
I see using this device as a router for E.G. grandma's / friend / other family. Where someone tech literate buys the thing that does 99.9% of the desired work for a lot less headache and that you know will see updates because it's supported from day 0 by OpenWRT / the community.
Wifi 6E, with the upper band frequencies, might be enough to convince me to get it too.
3: True. x86 would be better, but that doesn't mean that NVME is of any use on a router like that. Like I said: it's too fast and too expensive at any size compared to alternatives. And not easy removable.
8: I'm not aware of any problems. Why would TLS and HTTPS not work? AFAIK, when NTP is not yet up, OpenWrt sets system time to the timestamp of the most recent saved file. That is good enough not to run into "certificate not yet valid" situations. And what HTTPS and TLS are you talking about? DNS over <something> won't work until WAN is up. When WAN is up, NTP is up too.
5: I don't. What good is a slow cheap router if I need another device next to it? Might as well put an old laptop/desktop as router instead.
Lots of routers are supported by OpenWrt, until they aren't. I already mentioned mwlwifi - they were the best routers, most recommended, until that driver was abandoned. Soldered wifi from another manufacturer won't change the situation. Works today; crashes tomorrow.
Coming in at under $100 is a lofty goal, but if they make the hardware, I'll buy one. The Turris Omnia was close.
I've been using (and previously contributing) to OpenWrt for almost 10 years, it's an excellent project and deserves some spotlight, I really hope this gains some traction.
If they're selling it at cost, ~$100 is not so unrealistic. It's similar in specs to the GL-MT3000 from GL.iNet which retails for $109, albeit without some of the price-increasing niceties like NVME, redundant recovery flash, or built-in usb-to-serial converters: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt3000/
G.iNet is wholly based upon OpenWRT. They get the benefit of the free software and can undersell because they don't need to support it. I know I'm oversimplifying, but it's at least partially true.
I'm a big fan of OpenWRT. I switched to it after running pfSense for a lot of years. Anyone can donate to the project here: https://openwrt.org/donate
Fully agree, I debated editing my comment to recommend against purchasing it. I bought the aforementioned device after hearing that GL.iNet sells their devices with very minimally modified OpenWRT and that a stock image is freely available, and only after going to set it up did I learn that they no longer publish things like their uboot and kernel trees, and that the stock openwrt image for the device was community contributed. It's very frustrating and I regret purchasing from them.
That being said, a huge portion of the consumer-oriented router brands are based on openwrt/buildroot today, so they're far from the only group guilty of benefitting from openwrt without contributing things back.
I just got one of these. It is certainly supported! I am now running my own homebrewed build of openwrt 23.05.2
I updated the gl-inet firmware to the latest 4.4.6, and then flashed vanilla openwrt 23.05.2 through the luci web interface.
I played around with the uboot flasher which takes an img file. I haven't played around enough with it yet to unpack the images to see if they are different formats or not.
It sounds like you are doing the right things. I guess check the hashes to make sure the files are intact? I haven't tested other versions or snapshots.
cameroncc
December 12, 2023, 4:07am 5
Did you just use the sysupgrade image from the firmware selector? How long did it take to fully flash?
gee_one
December 12, 2023, 5:30am 6
Yes, for the vanilla firmware, I used the sysupgrade version from the firmware selector, 23.05.2.
I don't remember how long it took, but it wasn't very long. I think about 5 mins or less. I had a serial console as well, so it was easy to see that some activity was going on.
cameroncc
December 15, 2023, 4:13am 11
Well, I just reflashed the GL.iNet image from uboot and then flashed the OpenWrt sysupgrade image from luci again just like before so I could try to ssh and read dmesg before messing with UART and it just... worked... no idea why
I'm not sure what to make of your comment, what is this in reference to? The last commit on the uboot tree you've posted was 4 years ago...
I realize that 23.05 is supported on the device, but my point is that it was entirely done by individual contributors from outside of GL.iNet, not contributed by the company itself. It sucks because GL.iNet sort of built a reputation off of being the openwrt router brand, and used to be in relatively good standing, but have shifted their approach since. Now they benefit off the reputation they built previously, because of people like me who assume they're still doing that before making purchases.
"I realise the 23.05 is supported on the device, but my point is that it was entirely done by individual contributers from outside of GL.inet, not contributed by the company itself."
Not sure I understand why this would not be exactly what one would want. (Namely, people outside the company being able to get the hardware to work with an open source OS.^1) Who wants to be stuck with a proprietary vendor OS on a router, something like Ubiquiti (a company recommended countless times on HN), where the only way to get the full features is to use their OS instead of choice of Linux/BSD installed by the buyer.
AFAICT, GL.inet software is generally no better than OpenWRT or other open source projects. It's probably terrible. Why would anyone expect otherwise. Good reason to compile OpenWRT for oneself.
The GL.inet software is probably getting worse. FWIW, one can still buy the older models. The pre-installed bootloader can be replaced. For newer models, might have to contact GL.inet. It's not clear if you are suggesting one cannot get the source to the bootloader for the router you bought, i.e., you asked GL.inet and they said no or did not respond. If that's the case, then I am interested to know.
AFAIK, people bought the older models for the hardware, e.g., GB ethernet, small form factor, and being supported by OpenWRT. GL.inet is a hardware company that lets the buyer replace the pre-installed OS with their own version; this is anticipated. That is more than many companies selling similar products.
There may be better travel router hardware available today. But being known to work with OpenWRT is an important factor for some buyers. For _some_ GL.inet models, the hardware is known to work with OpenWRT and u-boot compiled and installed by the buyer. AFAICT, the models with the Mediatek 7981 SoC are not a problem. If this is wrong, please do tell.
daniel March 7, 2023, 5:38pm 33
fakemanhk:
while their MT2500/MT3000 using Mediatek chipset I might go for it since it has higher chance to get vanilla OpenWrt on it.
MT2500 and MT3000 will definitely get vanilla OpenWrt on them. I'm working on this. gl.inet has provided hardware and all necessary documentation (schematics, ...) to do this. Would of course be nicer if they'd even do that themselves, but that's too much to ask, I guess. It's quite different case from the SiFlower SoC where there isn't even any sourcecode for most drivers. For MT7981 everything relevant is available in sourcecode, just needed some work to go to upstream Linux and will land in OpenWrt very soon.
> so they're far from the only group guilty of benefitting from openwrt without contributing
This is certainly true. SoC vendors often base their SDK on a fixed version of OpenWrt and then add proprietary patches on top. Then sell the SoC + SDK to a device vendor that adds additional proprietary patches and sells the device.
The issue with this is that the only way to fix security issues is to back-port them to the exact kernel version the SoC used as a base, and after a year or two, they completely drop support and you're left with a device that has known security vulnerabilities you can do nothing about.
How many old routers are still in use that are used as part of a botnet?
A few times a year I go looking for projects to support. It's tricky because I don't want to give money to a project that has tens of thousands of dollars in their account—I'd rather give to some smaller projects or indie devs!
> G.iNet is wholly based upon OpenWRT. They get the benefit of the free software and can undersell because they don't need to support it. I know I'm oversimplifying, but it's at least partially true.
Are they complying with the license terms? I guess I don't understand why it would be considered a negative for them to build a product based on OpenWRT.
It's not a big negative from the consumer point of view. I've purchased some (3) and supported other (6) Gl.iNet products and they've been okay. Several times I have run into issues where the routers have effectively bricked the ability to update the firmware image, while continuing to operate with the outdated and insecure image still running. I've successfully un-bricked a few of them, but that can be a tricky task and takes a while.
They do seem to be complying with the license terms, and the free portions of the software can be downloaded from the Gl.iNet website.
Most of the negatives have been covered in other comments here.
As a small contributor to OpenWrt, I don't like the whole: release one version of their proprietary fork of OpenWrt and then just do security fixes on top of that.
If they really want to focus on hardware and base everything on top of OpenWrt, it would be easier for them to upstream as much as possible and let the community handle updates. Even donating would be less expensive. It would be somewhat of a win-win situation IMO.
> I'm a big fan of OpenWRT. I switched to it after running pfSense for a lot of years. Anyone can donate to the project here: https://openwrt.org/donate
Would you care to go into why you chose it over pf/Opn Sense? Considering that you have to reinstall so it's not automatic, what makes it enough better to make the change worth your while?
I'm currently running OpnSense for my personal routing and firewalling needs, and considered OpenWRT a few weeks ago (for linux driver support, but that's another story). In the end, I changed my nic and kept opnsense.
Sure thing. I don't want to make any unfounded accusations, but I observed some unstable behavior on my pfSense installations. It wasn't clear if it had been hacked, or if it was just buggy, but it seemed more like a hack to me. Because it's installed as a proprietary blob from a "trusted" source, I couldn't do much troubleshooting. This was shortly after the opnSense mockery, which reduced my confidence in the professionalism of Netgate.
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/ssk8zj/til_in_2017...
Also, while exploring other options, I found that OpenWRT provided much higher bandwidth on the same processor/memory footprint. I was able to reduce the VM CPU and memory allocations after switching.
Finally, there were a number of features I needed that pfSense just did not support. One was IGMP snooping, another was IPv6 using a provider tunnel.
I've been using OpenWRT forever (WRT54G era) and only buy devices that can run OpenWRT. GL.iNet is my go-to out-of-the-box OpenWRT recommendation for others looking for a router. Their UI is a lot easier to use than LuCI for most things. I had a RPi-based Wireguard VPN setup to a family member's house, but I switched it out with a GL.iNet because their UI for managing Wireguard devices is so much easier. Especially since I can access it using their Goodcloud management portal from anywhere.
I hope OpenWRT pulls off having their own device. That would definitely be an upgrade from GL.iNet. But compared to getting a completely non-open firmware like every other GL.iNet competitor, even their versions of OpenWRT are a major step up.
There are a few of their devices that have upstream support in OpenWRT. But it is like buying any other device for running stock OpenWRT in that regard - you have to do your homework to make sure you get something compatible.
I still have OpenWRT running on a RPi4 'router' and 3 TP-Link routers as APs on my network. But still wish I could get GL.iNet's Wireguard management in Luci...
Sounds about correct! I have one that I bought in 2018 but I remember it being more like 450+ € at the time.
I have had a fiber line connected during the whole time and it has served me well (I haven't done much customizing on it though, I have to admit. It's just the router for my home network).
First, that doesn't make sense when there are full modern system boards that sell for a fraction of that individually.
Second, why would you need something different that what routers are already doing? They are just trying to sell their own openWRT routers, the hardware has existed for a decade at or below $100, why would it be difficult for them to meet that?
They aren’t just trying to sell a router, they are trying to make available a fully open router without blobs right from boot, that is unbrickable, and selling it essentially at cost
Where are the numbers here? How does what you are saying connect to what is being talked about in a concrete way? You are talking about software and saying it has to cost $100 or more while there are $30 routers on amazon.
This is more or less discussed in the link. They started looking at BananaPi products as a starting point, but have some requirements that existing boards don't fulfill. One in particular that probably precludes all of the $30 boards you're talking is:
"that this router isabeautiful (sic) example of excellent GPL/LGPL compliance"
These routers are crap. Anyone who cares a tiny bit about their wireless connectivity won't buy this. And I don't think OpenWRT wants to associate their name with "low-quality" routers.
What you are saying here is speculation. Most router's shortcoming is software. I've used cheap netgear routers with openwrt and they work incredibly well.
If you get up to mass-scale production quantities, $100 might be feasible. I imagine small-scale production with little up-front capital and no guaranteed market might be lot more challenging. It's not software, you're going to need large orders to get good prices.
I think about Meego/Jolla phone and tablet, Ubuntu Phone, Kobol Helios and tons of other projects that have either failed or are struggling due to market size and ecosystem.
I've been running a Turris Omnia for the last few years, which I've been fairly happy with. Network performance is about average and the platform as a whole is certainly due for an update, but stability has been great, it receives regular upgrades, and I'm happy to pay more for a project that has an open mindset. Not sure many feel the same way about commodity network hardware though.
Anything with radio involves a ton of expensive certification work.
With something like a rpi that sells millions of units, that can be spread over way more units than something like this that (optimistically) gets sold to a few thousand nerds and that's it.
I think the second outcome is pretty much impossible. The device will be built and sold by BananaPi, which receives a license to the OpenWrt trademark in exchange for a $5-$10 donation per device sold.
The OpenWrt project does not pay its developers, so the money will only be used to cover infrastructure costs.
Infrastructure costs for a project like openwrt could be nearly zero if the infrastructure was designed with cost in mind (site behind cloudflare, free tier in Aws/Google cloud for build bots, code on GitHub, etc).
You can probably run the whole thing for $100/year of unavoidable costs (eg. Domain registration).
Also did CI/CD on OSS projects and highly agree with this - CI/CD is not free, especially if it involves anything hardware related, which is likely in at least some subset of OpenWRT's cases.
As an OpenWRT user, I am very optimistic about this. I'm sure almost all users would fork in money for this instead of going for hostile mainstream companies.
Also the USB-C UART and recovery read-only bootloader is a nice touch. Really looking forward to it.
One concern is just misplaced anger because some users misunderstand what this means for OpenWRT going forward, but I hope they'll be in the minority.
> The OpenWrt project does not pay its developers,
This is actually surprising to me, but I guess the donation money isn't enough to pay developers. Would the surplus if infrastructure costs are covered go to developers or is it all going to a rainy day fund?
Maybe that money could be used for meet-up events and other activities that benefit the project and indirectly its contributors. That seems like a safe way to spend money without getting into trouble for paying some and not others, risking the open-source spirit of the project.
Yeah, it's probably not a great idea to pay developers with the donation money. I am not sure why I thought it was acceptable, but it is obvious now why this is a terrible idea.
Prolific devs could setup a Patreon/Librepay if they'd like, but that opens up its own can of worms like false expectations/entitlement of some donators. They might prefer not to do that for that reason alone.
I use a Beryl as a travel router (connects to Hotel or Plane Wifi, you authenticate the captive portal, then it creates a separate wifi network and opens a VPN tunnel). It's such a great little device for less than $100 and allows me to keep things a bit more secure, avoid config for each device, and on planes it allows us to split a higher capacity plan. All OpenWRT
While this and other GL.iNet devices use OpenWRT (with their own custom UI/frontend), they don't contribute to the OpenWRT project in terms of code or funding, many of their devices are incompatible with mainline OpenWRT releases, and software updates are few and far between.
I have one of these myself, they're handy devices, but I wouldn't go and recommend them as good OpenWRT devices.
I would love to buy into OpenWRT but I need a mesh router due to the size of my house. Do you know of the recommended hardware? I couldn't find anything the last time I searched a year or two ago
Since the demise of Soekris and PC Engines, I don't know of good alternatives. I'd like to be excited about newer ARM-based, power sipping routers- but which ones aren't so cheaply made? The aformentioned companies hit that sweet spot- a 2-3x cost premium for industrial quality and an open approach. They were devoted to hardware and wasted no energy on branded forks of OpenWRT.
I'm curious to try some Teltonika products like the RUT series. They seem sparsely documented on the OpenWRT wiki, though.
Curious to hear any Soekris/PC Engines fans experience with newer stuff.
The $100 price tag is much less important to me than long term production runs. I hope they take a page from the pcengines playbook, and arrange to build this with minimal changes over a 5-10 year period.
For instance, I can imagine them holding all specs constant except that they ship a new wifi radio every 2-3 years.
This would allow other open source projects to target it and be rock solid. For instance, my pc engines openbsd router is something like 8 years old and has never crashed.
I’d happily pay a $50-100 premium to get a brand new board that’s fast enough, but that had all the bugs worked out the last few years.
It looks like at least one of the radios is on the same SoC as the CPU, Ethernet, etc., so swapping out just the radio every few years isn't quite feasible. Such highly-integrated WiFi SoCs are pretty standard for this price range, and getting a processor with enough PCIe and Ethernet to use only external MAC+PHY solutions is a lot more expensive.
The MT7976C they're including is a 3x3 WiFi 6 chip, and you can buy them as a standalone module for ~ $25. I think the idea is that it's providing the access point radio.
That's the part I'd suggest swapping out every few years. That might mean people are stuck with older bluetooth or a low performance WiFi radio or whatever on the SoC, but that won't impact performance much. (In the worst case, they could just disable the SoC radios to prevent RF interference with the "real" radio.)
I think this is intended to offer simultaneous dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) using two separate radios, as all decent APs for over a decade have done. The SoC provides one of the two radios, and the second is connected over PCIe. Whether your 2.4GHz or 5GHz radio more badly needs an upgrade in a few years can be hard to predict.
I'm reasonably sure this line of chips is designed to be the only active radio in an access point:
> Filogic 830 packs a wide variety of features into a compact, ultra-low power 12nm SoC, allowing customers to design differentiated solutions for routers, access points and mesh systems. The SoC integrates four Arm Cortex-A53 processors operating at up to 2GHz per core for up to +18,000 DMIPs processing power, dual 4x4 Wi-Fi 6/6E for up to 6Gbps connectivity, two 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and a host of peripheral interfaces. Filogic 830’s built-in hardware acceleration engines for Wi-Fi offloading and networking enable faster and more reliable connectivity. In addition, the chipset also supports MediaTek FastPath™ technology for low latency applications such as gaming and AR/VR.
My reading of that is that the ARMs are there for software defined networking tasks, and not to run the router OS. I could be wrong. However, the OpenWRT spec lists this chip as a network adapter, not as the main SoC.
I think the "Filogic 820" branding may actually apply to the combination of the MT7981B SoC and the MT7976C NIC. https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/MediaTek seems to have actual detailed specs for these chips. It looks like the MT7981B is what has the ARM Cortex-A53 cores to run Linux, Ethernet, PCIe, and a 2x3:2 radio. The MT7976C is just a NIC with no application processor cores, but it has both a 2.4GHz and 5/6GHz radio. A NIC with two separate radios seems to be a relatively recent development, probably spurred by increased demand for tri-band routers after the opening of the 6GHz band.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a router which is supported by OpenWrt and has a functioning VDSL2 modem? I know I could get a standalone VDSL2 terminator or use another proprietary VDSL2 router in bridge mode in front of the OpenWrt based one, but that just means that the abandoned / buggy / vulnerable firmware lives one box further in my network.
I would also be interested to connect my DSL cable directly to a device with OpenWRT on it that doesn't cost $500+. I currently have a separate device as my modem, DrayTek Vigor 166. In case someone is wondering who's still using VDSL in 2024, that would be most of Germany.
I wish them best luck, but it would fall in a similar league of boards like the NanoPi R5S, which is hard to beat in price.
https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...
On the other hand, they would sell it with direct support for real OpenWrt, while many other manufacturers, including FriendlyElec, often publish franken-Linux distros that force users to resort to others such as Armbian and DietPi to be sure their OS doesn't become obsolete and unsupported in a few years.
tbf openwrt is also an unusual linux distro, just a very widely used one.
The difference is that OpenWrt has the entire source code available, and unlike those franken-distros, it is built as vanilla linux + a set of patches. As long as there is enough interest, anyone can rebase these patches on top of a newer mailine kernel. For example some Ubnt XW boards recently got an update to 23.05 after being stuck on 19.07.
I don't feel like it really needs to compete on price though. As long as it's not totally unreasonable, I (and I assume other OpenWRT enthusiasts) would gladly pay a premium for a device that includes truly first class OpenWRT support.
I will absolutely pay $100 for that router with top notch openwrt support. Not cheap, but very reasonable.
oh these are very interesting
I have been looking for an open source replacement for the Elecom WRH-583BK2-S is there anything in there? It's a W65 x D35 x H20.5 (mm), dual LAN, 802.11ac router.
> GPL compliance: 3b. "Accompany it with a written offer ... to give any third party ... a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code"
I'm guessing it will also be a tag from `git.openwrt.org`, from the same development and release process that continues to support numerous other consumer devices, and keep them up to date.
It might be good to clarify this, since people who've seen a lot of open source projects can imagine ways this could go bad.
I have a very favorable impression of the OpenWrt project, and I'm looking forward to this being a good thing.
Forum post:
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/openwrt-one-celebrating-20-years...
I use OpenWRT and what I have wished for is a configuration file as robust and simple as the one for pfSense. Version upgrades amount to a migration headache.
I've been using the attended sysupgrade and I guess I'm lucky that there's no migration needed at all. All settings are preserved.
Also, I think the configuration file is already robust enough; you can edit them using a text editor like vim or edit them using the UI or edit them using the CLI tool. I cannot think of anything to make the configuration file even more robust.
The pfSense config works on all versions to perfectly restore the configuration.
At least on the hardware I've owned, OpenWRT has to be reconfigured after version upgrade or else it becomes unstable.
I've experienced this on OpenWrt as well. There's a backup/restore config files button but it's sort of a best-effort type of operation. If you are restoring across many versions and the config files are no longer sane, you will end up with a broken system. But the config files were restored exactly as advertised :)
Thankfully all the config files are plain text and can be manipulated however you like. It is usually not too difficult to take working config while fixing or disusing problematic files.
I know price is a big differentiator, but why not cooperate with Omnia Turris? https://www.turris.com/en/products/omnia/
as you said, price.
the turris devices are tinker friendly, feature rich and high quality - and not cheap.
truth be told, the aio router-server embedded thing seems very difficult because peoples expectations vary widely and the whole ids/dpi and media-server stuff gets somewhat more demanding at gigabit speeds than what unoptimized stacks can accomplish with commodity low-power hardware.
I see this as being the Corolla to Turris's Unimog. The Omnia is a sliders-to-the-right dreambox with every possible interface, it has a freakin' SFP slot, three miniPCIe slots, I mean, wow.
As a result, it's capable of 99% of jobs, but it's only the best choice for about 2% of them. For most things, the Omnia is tremendous overkill and nowhere near cost effective. Therefore it suffers low sales volume, and the price never comes down.
This new box might only be capable of 75% of jobs, but it should be a good cost-effective choice for quite a lot of them. It still won't be the cheapest, but it'll be reasonable, and they should sell truckloads of them.
What is the intended purpose of an openwrt banana pi?
I associate openwrt with router firmware/software, so I would expect a lot of ethernet ports (more than two). Or use it as a wifi router/access point, when I only need one port. If I would want to do any networking tricks, I would fall back to a rpi/banana pi, which wouldn't do routing or wifi.
I'm only curious. I have two rpi's in my drawer doing nothing.
I imagine it’s intended to be combined with an Ethernet switch. One or two (potentially bonded) Ethernet ports can carry a lot of VLANs.
That's how basically all consumer routers work: an SoC with about two Ethernet interfaces, at least one but usually both connected to a managed Ethernet switch chip, using separate VLANs for the WAN and LAN ports. Routing both Ethernet ports through the switch chip is usually done so that the switch can do some NAT offload.
The sort answer: "network services".
Longer answer:
1) providing basic networking (default gateway, connection to upstream provider)
2) basic security: firewalling + natting
3) basic network daemons, and "daemons": DNS, DHCP, IPv6 autoconf, and a nice new one: 802.11s ("network mesh": keep wifi at 5 bars by kicking people off their access point if another access point can provide a better connection)
4) more advanced networking stuff: VPN (l3vpn, l2ptp, l2ptmp, mesh vpn), cloud connections/vpns, WAN connections, redundancy (downstream and upstream, l2 and l3, ...)
5) more advanced security stuff: 802.1x, stateful firewalls, inspecting firewalls, IDS, ...
6) server networking stuff: proxy, reverse proxy, statefull firewalling, load balancing, ...
7) more advanced daemons (on network devices it's mostly proxying for redundancy and/or load balancing): File sharing, SMTP, WebDAV, Active Directory, payment protocols, ...
Now a lot of these OpenWRT can't provide, but you'd be surprised and their support for new things goes up every year.
I hope it doesn't get dirty like what cyanogenmod did before. btw, Under 100$ would be excellent price for me. I would definetly buy it
Personally, OpenWRT doesn't really sell me nowadays as having a ton of value.
For a router, you can feasibly use an off the shelf prosumer device like Unifi, or, more compellingly, an actual robust OS like OpnSense, PfSense, Sophos or Untangle.
As for access point capability, that should really be segmented, and any off the shelf Ruckus, Aruba, Unifi etc. will always outperform the drivers available to OpenWRT. I'm a staunch advocate of an eBay ruckus 510 or 610, which will be very little in terms of cost and also your best home access point ever.
It's nice that it's open source and all, but in terms of raw performance or value-add, I don't see it. Open source for the sake of open source is... well, another discussion.
I agree that OpenWRT isn't absolutely the best, but anything you have mentioned above (prosumer devices like Unifi, or separate APs like Ruckus, Aruba) will cost far more than a simple consumer level combined router-and-AP with OpenWRT.
You probably don't see it because you are used to spending big bucks on your networking equipment whereas most people will spend $50 and then install OpenWRT to wring the most value out of it.
You can buy a Ruckus r610 for $40 from eBay.
It's not a package deal, but router hardware for Pfsense or OpnSense, or even a Tp link or Unifi device isn't exactly breaking the bank.
It's also vastly superior enough for the Open WRT to not be worth it.
Does OpenWRT appeal to people with a low degree of knowledge, time or skill? Heck no.
The most applicable scenario I can think of is someone who is very knowledgeable and has a lot of time but very little money, but OpenWRT exclusively as a device for people who live in India or Brazil is again not super compelling to *me* as a technological package.
Though I respect conceptually that other people might have different perspectives, I live in a country with an average living standard, so I can't really share it.
OpenWRT enables people to build mesh networks. I helped building some by being part of a Freifunk community and it was a great feeling - you get to tinker around with network stuff and in doing so help others (free wifi for everyone, yay!).
Free wifi of all things is probably on the lower end of my list when it comes to helping people.
Huh, why? Internet access is close to a human right these days, IMHO.
> The most applicable scenario I can think of is someone who is very knowledgeable and has a lot of time but very little money
Yup. That was me as a high school student. Or rather, I wanted to be very knowledge, and did have a lot of time and very little money. OpenWRT was perfect to get started with tinkering with networking.
> As for access point capability, that should really be segmented, and any off the shelf Ruckus, Aruba, Unifi etc. will always outperform the drivers available to OpenWRT. I'm a staunch advocate of an eBay ruckus 510 or 610, which will be very little in terms of cost and also your best home access point ever.
This. Your comments about open source are relevant but IMO these days with work from home, tons of devices, larger/more well constructed homes, increased traffic for anything/everything, etc managed APs are just the way to go.
I'm a big advocate of OpenWRT but many years ago I got sick of fiddling with basic connectivity on a regular basis and dropped a few hundred dollars on a standard Unifi setup. I haven't touched or thought of my "pipes" since - to me there's nothing worse than being deep flow into a project and then having to fiddle with some router or access point because it's being flaky, dropping packets, negotiating slower link speeds, etc. It's much better than factory firmware in most cases but that's a pretty low bar.
Ubiquiti has had some controversies with data access, cloud stuff, etc but I just can't be bothered to care. For $100 x $NUM APs and a docker container to run the controller it just works.
Unifi has been truly game changing for me in terms of making wifi ethernet level reliable, predictable, and consistent - everywhere without needing to take on yet another level of deep expertise in Wifi.
I've used dd-wrt on my home routers in the past -- I bought a pre-flashed linksys router from FlashRouters, a support company affiliated with the project. The router worked fine for a year and then started dropping connections. Then, it took a lot of time for me to debug whether it was a software or hardware issues (it was hardware after all).
To replace it, I saw that Asus routers use a custom wwrt by default. And if you want to truly control it, there's an open source project that lets you adjust it more (Merlin).
I bought an Asus router and haven't looked back.
I used OpenWRT on an actual Linksys WRT device back in the day. These days I use separate components for my home network: Huawei modem, pfSense router/firewall, Unifi wifi, unmanaged switches. This gives me more control (and more learning opportunity) but obviously I see the benefit of the "all in one" type devices OpenWRT supports in many applications.
Back then I didn't really understand routing etc. and just used OpenWRT as plug and play. But is it actually a good alternative to the above component-based setup when just a single device is desired?
Wish this thing had a second 2.5 GbE port instead of a 1 GbE port.
It is probably a SoC limitation... Feel free to suggest an alternative ;)
RK3588 can handle 2 2.5G ports. Would bump the price a bit, but also is a significant CPU upgrade so you are likely to get much better usable bandwidth with packet inspection and/or QoS.
That’s a pretty significant jump in complexity, the RK3588 is one of the most powerful SOCs available. A cool part, but I’m not sure it fits the OpenWRT use case
What's the complexity? They start at $70 or so in the RK3588S flavor, it's basically a CPU with a PCIe bus, the software, board complexity, and cost seems just about the same as the proposed OpenWRT solution.
These are $30+ with PMIC in China. Very expensive SOC. RK3566es are around $6.
Sure there's a bit of a premium, seems like a pretty big CPU and PCIe upgrade and would allow 2x2.5G.
1. that isn't going to help you get under the $100 price point
2. Mediatek might not be willing to provide their WiFi SoC if you are not using their compute SoC, and Rockchip doesn't have any WiFi chips.
The rk3588 is frankly a non-starter.
> Mediatek might not be willing to provide their WiFi SoC if you are not using their compute SoC
There are some China-only ZTE devices that do this, but they obviously have a different order volume and scale that makes it possible. (The main SoC is replaced with a ZXIC one, a ZTE subsidiary)
Seems odd, what's the point of an asymmetric speeds on a 2 port router? Dual 1G (cheaper) or dual 2.5G would make much more sense.
The WiFi is also >1Gbps.
I expect it's mostly a cost thing, but I can see a couple of scenarios where it could make sense:
* >1G internet in a mostly or exclusively wifi home
* <=1G internet + a 2.5G LAN, so that ethernet <=> wifi and ethernet<=>SSD transfers are faster
The second scenario could actually fit me right now, but my ISP is expecting to roll out multi-gigabit options later this year year.
At any rate, I agree with everyone else, I would prefer two 2.5G ports.
In the first case I'm dubious that MT7981B can handle usefully more than GigE with the usual small packets, firewall rules, anti-buffer bloat, QoS, numerous clients, and related that people expect of a router these days.
Seems to really limit the audience and shorten the useful life of a router to penny pinch. How about a $88 NanoPi with dual 2.5G, 4GB ram, 32GB eMMC, and wifi? Is it really worth $10 to have 1/4th the ram, 1/256th the storage, 1G instead of 2.5G and less CPU[0]?
I got similar with the faster RK3588, 8GB ram, dual 2.5 and 1G, and metal case for $120. I've been quite impressed, it's about half as fast as my xeon E3-1230 from years ago.
[0] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804821229437.html
LWN article that I got the link from: https://lwn.net/Articles/957255/
I would buy one for sure!
WiFi is always a problem with flashing random devices. If they can build a device that has stable WiFi with external antennas, it would be a game changer.
Having a reasonably powerful router from 2016, the only thing that would motivate me to upgrade is Wi-Fi 6E (6 GHz).
Meanwhile, what router do you suggest, to be used with openwrt?
There isn't a wide consensus anymore, like there was with the buffalo model.
Integrated modem would be nice, but it is very difficult to find it.
edit: available in EU; Linksys E8450/Belkin RT3200 aren't available on Italy it seems.
Last time I checked the Linksys E8450/Belkin RT3200 was widely recommended.
If I was buying today, I would want something with more than 1GbE.
The Linksys E8450/Belkin RT3200 is a solid and affordable router. UBI firmware support, hardware NAT offloading and DSA support for better VLAN performance. Less than perfect WiFi range.
I can make a vote against x86 in a virtualized environment like ProxMox. Setup is just way harder than it needs to be and there are a lot of gotchas.
I’m looking as well. Although now it seems like I should just buy this BPi when it is available. I would like to go back to ARM on my router… just nothing Broadcom!
What is harder? I have a setup just like that. Create VM, use open wrt image as disk Vm, configure some passthrough for the nics and press start?
Updates are as easy as other device (press button on web interface or use openwrt cli)
IMO, owrt runs best on x86 (it’s your usual Linux kernel after all) and you get the best support and performance. You also avoid a lot of all the bugs related to embedded development with custom SoC, internal switch, vlans, flash layout, possibility of brick, bootloader stuff, etc.
I welcome you to come on over and set my VLANs up, because because my x86 hardware and ProxMox, it is not happening.
More generally, is there a good place to ask these questions? There are several under this post already with different requirements, and I have one too, with different requirements — I just want an edge gateway to route upstream and provide basic local network services (DCHP et al, and will turn off any radios) at low power. OpenWRT's hardware table seems not very useful; I can't, for instance, filter for at least two ethernet ports.
>OpenWRT's hardware table seems not very useful; I can't, for instance, filter for at least two ethernet ports.
You could download the CSV dump of the hardware table [1] and filter in e.g. LibreOffice Calc.
[1] https://openwrt.org/_media/toh_dump_tab_separated.zip
I have very basic requirements: a solid router that runs, and has some free memory. Everytime that I try to find a replacement that has some wide consensus, I fail to find it. My router is now 15 years old... Some people in this thread have suggested Linksys E8450/Belkin RT3200, which aren't available in EU it seems. So, it's not easy. I'll wait 15 more years probably.
I'm happy with the RT3200 based on Filogic 800 but now you could get Flint 2 or BPi-R3 based on Filogic 830.
https://store-eu.gl-inet.com/en-jp/products/flint-2-gl-mt600...
I found Mercusys AX6000 (aka mr90x) to be a great choice.
https://openwrt.org/toh/mercusys/mr90x_v1
Anything with the MT7986B chipset is a good choice, they support Wifi6, have a 2.5G ethernet port, have decent amounts of RAM/flash and mostl importantly have a fast enough CPU to do high speed WAN to LAN routing and firewalling.
NVMe seems like overkill for a router of this level, but in practice getting M.2 drives is a lot easier/cheaper than eMMC. And while microSD can work, it doesn't have the reliability, write durability, and random IO of a 'real' drive.
I might be interested, depending on the power consumption, and on whether or not it has enough resources to run a DNS server (for reasons of ad blocking mostly). Don't particularly care about the price tag, would easily pay twice the target price.
Hopefully you would actually be able to get a full speed transfer between the Ethernet ports; I had to go back to the factory firmware on my router in order to take full advantage of my 1 gigabit Internet connection.
Did you have hardware acceleration enabled on, i dont think it is by default as most people dont need it and its not always supported.
It's been a few years at this point; everything I was able to find towards that effect was enabled from what I remember.
If they're able to deliver what's in the email I'll be picking one up.
If it was several years ago and on a router that was not too expensive, then there's a good chance it's CPU was still an ancient MIPS core or two, mated to vastly more modern radios. Cheap routers have only recently started moving to ARM cores with enough performance to actually do routing, traffic shaping, etc. at gigabit speeds. There were a ton of routers sold that could only get close to a gigabit of WAN to LAN throughput by offloading NAT to their built-in Ethernet switch.
Does that mean dual USB-C ports, or will the console host also need to supply power?
I'd love to see a 10g version... but it probably doesnt make sense for like 95% of the people, both in terms of specs and finantially (2x price? You probably want 2 10g ports too).
yea, dualport 10gig and not underpowered soc would probably require active cooling
I would have pointed you towards the BPI-R4, but they haven't quite got the accessories around it out the door yet. (Ie. The 802.11be radio add-on card and the case are not available yet)
Would absolutely love to buy this and throw OpenBSD on it. Not all proposed hw appears to be supported yet but if this gains traction then that might be enough of a catalyst.
That's fantastic news.
OpenWRT-based cheap travel routers have been a life-saver for me during my trips, specially to countries behind Iron Curtain firewalls.
I'll buy at least one as soon as it comes out.
How does a travel router help in this case? Preconfigured VPN?
(Asking out of total ignorance)
Sounds like he's using it as a site-to-site VPN
Bring it with you "home network setup" with devices pre shared keys and only authentication to a portal one time or an Ethernet port. Also let's you share one paid-for connection—on an airplane for example.
Any reason why they seem to consistently stay a generation behind the current one in their highest supported Wi-Fi standard?
Yes, it's mostly support from the Linux Kernel. The Linux kernel driver(s) need to support the Wi-Fi generation and need to support the mode(s) for use as more than a client device.
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/Documentation/mode...
What is m.2 2042?
2042 would be 20mm wide and 42mm long.
That's unlikely to be what was meant. It's probably m.2 2242, a shortish but "normal" drive size in the embedded space.
Probably M.2 2242 (22mm x 42mm) with a typo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2
The M.2 standard allows module widths of 12, 16, 22 and 30 mm
Notice no 20 mm width is allowed as part of the M.2 standard. The device specs are likely a typo.
And then there is EDSFF's E1.S 30110 (30112 really).
It's a connector for an internal SSD.
As others have said, it was probably supposed to read "m.2 2242" which is physically in-between the size of the 2230 drives that the Steam Deck uses and the 2280 ones that most modern desktops and laptops use.
Nice! But it would be even better to have SFP+ options too.
Looks like there is some progress now for running OpenWRT on Asus RT-AX89X.
What actual routers can I buy on Amazon and use OpenWRT to create totally customized captive portals in it?
Please post the links!
Anything that can run OpenWRT can have customized captive portals.
What MAINSTREAM routers can I buy on Amazon which actually let me install OpenWRT or come with it?
There are two topics on OpenWrt forum about recommended hardware:
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/whats-your-favourite-cheap-lede-...
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/whats-your-favorite-enthusiast-l...
Is there a link to the hardware design yet? Or is it just the announcement only? I tried googling but found nothing.
The thread mentions it, it's basically a MediaTek MT7981B with some extra components. It would be interesting if they can get all the things they mention in the < $100 price range that they're aiming for.
OpenWRT is great and all but if I wanted a really customizable router I'd probably get a Mikrotik.
I am using half a dozen Mikrotik hAP AC flushed with OpenWRT.
Best of both worlds.
Two Ethernet sockets makes this a very attractive option.
I looked at the specs. It's a BananaPi R3 mini with stuff added that nobody will ever use. I can't really find a use for such a device, unless you're the maintainer for some kernel driver used on that board.
Compared to an ordinary router:
1) There's a bit more powerful CPU, barely enough for TOR or wireguard VPN. Doesn't say anything about hardware crypto.
2) There's 1 GB RAM, way too much for basic routing, barely enough for TOR, barely enough to run a webserver, but not both.
3) There's NVME storage as an option, but NVME is too small, too expensive, and MUCH too fast for a NAS with that kind of networking, and there's no USB3 or eSATA to connect external storage such as a large HDD or a DAS.
4) I assume that the wifi chip (only one?) is soldered. If the driver ever becomes unmaintained, like it happend with mwlwifi, you throw the router into the garbage.
5) It doesn't even have a network switch.
6) They plan to load it with various features (serial, USB debug, JTAG (ffs! why??)) that only devs will ever use, and only until they get it booting. No use for all that once it boots reliably.
7) Modbus? Who uses that!? I want mPCIe, GPIOs, I2c, SPI, serial (other than the debug port), RS485, you know... actually useful stuff!
8) And there's RTC on a device that 99.9999% of users will connect to the internet. Why? For the rare situations when it boots after a power failure before the ISP network is up? If it had SPI/I2c out, there are Raspberry Pi RTC modules that could be added for $1.
9) The price: 100$ is waaaay to much for something that's only a micro-router. GL-MT3000 is in the same price category and has USB3.
My ideal router would have:
- 2 GHz 4 core armv8 CPU, or at least 2 core armv7+vfpv3
- working frequency scaling and idle
- hardware crypto (wireguard, openvpn, TOR), hardware CRC32 (for btfs), hardware XOR (for MD RAID)
- RAM as SODIMM memory modules (even better if sold without them - recycle my own, upgrade any time)
- at least 3 mPCIe slots for wifi 2.4G, 5G, and WWAN modem (even better if sold without them - recycle my own, upgrade any time)
- 8 port switch with management
- WAN port separate from the switch
- eSATA with port multiplier support
- USB3 with UAS support
- GPIO identical to RPi, maybe one more serial port
- mounting holes that fit an ordinary GPU cooler
- temperature sensor on a wire
- PWM LEDs
- no GPU, no HDMI, no other video outputs
Unfortunately, no such device exists.
3: As a consumer, NVME drives are an off the shelf easy to source item. All of the storage cases you specify are better served by a 'full server', even if that is a desktop device running 'x86_64' OpenWRT.
8: RTC is SURPRISINGLY very important for E.G. Initial TLS / HTTPS connections and bootstrapping secure connections. It's also a serious quality of life aspect that doesn't cost that much to add. Surely you've seen the hell caused by Microsoft's attempts to fix this problem wreaking havoc with connection failures.
5: I suspect that was more to fit the form factor of an existing off the shelf case, and dangling a dumb-switch off the internal port is a reasonable option. This is annoying but I understand the reasons and tradeoffs.
I see using this device as a router for E.G. grandma's / friend / other family. Where someone tech literate buys the thing that does 99.9% of the desired work for a lot less headache and that you know will see updates because it's supported from day 0 by OpenWRT / the community.
Wifi 6E, with the upper band frequencies, might be enough to convince me to get it too.
3: True. x86 would be better, but that doesn't mean that NVME is of any use on a router like that. Like I said: it's too fast and too expensive at any size compared to alternatives. And not easy removable.
8: I'm not aware of any problems. Why would TLS and HTTPS not work? AFAIK, when NTP is not yet up, OpenWrt sets system time to the timestamp of the most recent saved file. That is good enough not to run into "certificate not yet valid" situations. And what HTTPS and TLS are you talking about? DNS over <something> won't work until WAN is up. When WAN is up, NTP is up too.
5: I don't. What good is a slow cheap router if I need another device next to it? Might as well put an old laptop/desktop as router instead.
Lots of routers are supported by OpenWrt, until they aren't. I already mentioned mwlwifi - they were the best routers, most recommended, until that driver was abandoned. Soldered wifi from another manufacturer won't change the situation. Works today; crashes tomorrow.
Coming in at under $100 is a lofty goal, but if they make the hardware, I'll buy one. The Turris Omnia was close.
I've been using (and previously contributing) to OpenWrt for almost 10 years, it's an excellent project and deserves some spotlight, I really hope this gains some traction.
If they're selling it at cost, ~$100 is not so unrealistic. It's similar in specs to the GL-MT3000 from GL.iNet which retails for $109, albeit without some of the price-increasing niceties like NVME, redundant recovery flash, or built-in usb-to-serial converters: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt3000/
G.iNet is wholly based upon OpenWRT. They get the benefit of the free software and can undersell because they don't need to support it. I know I'm oversimplifying, but it's at least partially true.
I'm a big fan of OpenWRT. I switched to it after running pfSense for a lot of years. Anyone can donate to the project here: https://openwrt.org/donate
Fully agree, I debated editing my comment to recommend against purchasing it. I bought the aforementioned device after hearing that GL.iNet sells their devices with very minimally modified OpenWRT and that a stock image is freely available, and only after going to set it up did I learn that they no longer publish things like their uboot and kernel trees, and that the stock openwrt image for the device was community contributed. It's very frustrating and I regret purchasing from them.
That being said, a huge portion of the consumer-oriented router brands are based on openwrt/buildroot today, so they're far from the only group guilty of benefitting from openwrt without contributing things back.
https://github.com/gl-inet/uboot-source-for_mtk
https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05.2/targets/media...
https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05.2/targets/media...
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/trouble-flashing-vanilla-openwrt...
I just got one of these. It is certainly supported! I am now running my own homebrewed build of openwrt 23.05.2
I updated the gl-inet firmware to the latest 4.4.6, and then flashed vanilla openwrt 23.05.2 through the luci web interface.
I played around with the uboot flasher which takes an img file. I haven't played around enough with it yet to unpack the images to see if they are different formats or not.
It sounds like you are doing the right things. I guess check the hashes to make sure the files are intact? I haven't tested other versions or snapshots.
Did you just use the sysupgrade image from the firmware selector? How long did it take to fully flash?
Yes, for the vanilla firmware, I used the sysupgrade version from the firmware selector, 23.05.2.
I don't remember how long it took, but it wasn't very long. I think about 5 mins or less. I had a serial console as well, so it was easy to see that some activity was going on.
Well, I just reflashed the GL.iNet image from uboot and then flashed the OpenWrt sysupgrade image from luci again just like before so I could try to ssh and read dmesg before messing with UART and it just... worked... no idea why
I'm not sure what to make of your comment, what is this in reference to? The last commit on the uboot tree you've posted was 4 years ago...
I realize that 23.05 is supported on the device, but my point is that it was entirely done by individual contributors from outside of GL.iNet, not contributed by the company itself. It sucks because GL.iNet sort of built a reputation off of being the openwrt router brand, and used to be in relatively good standing, but have shifted their approach since. Now they benefit off the reputation they built previously, because of people like me who assume they're still doing that before making purchases.
"I realise the 23.05 is supported on the device, but my point is that it was entirely done by individual contributers from outside of GL.inet, not contributed by the company itself."
Not sure I understand why this would not be exactly what one would want. (Namely, people outside the company being able to get the hardware to work with an open source OS.^1) Who wants to be stuck with a proprietary vendor OS on a router, something like Ubiquiti (a company recommended countless times on HN), where the only way to get the full features is to use their OS instead of choice of Linux/BSD installed by the buyer.
AFAICT, GL.inet software is generally no better than OpenWRT or other open source projects. It's probably terrible. Why would anyone expect otherwise. Good reason to compile OpenWRT for oneself.
The GL.inet software is probably getting worse. FWIW, one can still buy the older models. The pre-installed bootloader can be replaced. For newer models, might have to contact GL.inet. It's not clear if you are suggesting one cannot get the source to the bootloader for the router you bought, i.e., you asked GL.inet and they said no or did not respond. If that's the case, then I am interested to know.
AFAIK, people bought the older models for the hardware, e.g., GB ethernet, small form factor, and being supported by OpenWRT. GL.inet is a hardware company that lets the buyer replace the pre-installed OS with their own version; this is anticipated. That is more than many companies selling similar products.
There may be better travel router hardware available today. But being known to work with OpenWRT is an important factor for some buyers. For _some_ GL.inet models, the hardware is known to work with OpenWRT and u-boot compiled and installed by the buyer. AFAICT, the models with the Mediatek 7981 SoC are not a problem. If this is wrong, please do tell.
1. For example,
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/how-do-gl-inet-devices-become-su...
MT2500 and MT3000 will definitely get vanilla OpenWrt on them. I'm working on this. gl.inet has provided hardware and all necessary documentation (schematics, ...) to do this. Would of course be nicer if they'd even do that themselves, but that's too much to ask, I guess. It's quite different case from the SiFlower SoC where there isn't even any sourcecode for most drivers. For MT7981 everything relevant is available in sourcecode, just needed some work to go to upstream Linux and will land in OpenWrt very soon.
> so they're far from the only group guilty of benefitting from openwrt without contributing
This is certainly true. SoC vendors often base their SDK on a fixed version of OpenWrt and then add proprietary patches on top. Then sell the SoC + SDK to a device vendor that adds additional proprietary patches and sells the device.
The issue with this is that the only way to fix security issues is to back-port them to the exact kernel version the SoC used as a base, and after a year or two, they completely drop support and you're left with a device that has known security vulnerabilities you can do nothing about.
How many old routers are still in use that are used as part of a botnet?
They are not running stock openwrt and openwrt devs refer to their firmwares as "frankenwrt".
A few times a year I go looking for projects to support. It's tricky because I don't want to give money to a project that has tens of thousands of dollars in their account—I'd rather give to some smaller projects or indie devs!
See for example the audited financials of projects hosted by the Software in the Public Interest (SPI), where many do have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars already https://www.spi-inc.org/treasurer/reports/202311/#index4h3
I would totally buy this device if they make it happen. My current router is about four years old and runs OpenWRT.
> G.iNet is wholly based upon OpenWRT. They get the benefit of the free software and can undersell because they don't need to support it. I know I'm oversimplifying, but it's at least partially true.
Are they complying with the license terms? I guess I don't understand why it would be considered a negative for them to build a product based on OpenWRT.
It's not a big negative from the consumer point of view. I've purchased some (3) and supported other (6) Gl.iNet products and they've been okay. Several times I have run into issues where the routers have effectively bricked the ability to update the firmware image, while continuing to operate with the outdated and insecure image still running. I've successfully un-bricked a few of them, but that can be a tricky task and takes a while.
They do seem to be complying with the license terms, and the free portions of the software can be downloaded from the Gl.iNet website.
Most of the negatives have been covered in other comments here.
As a small contributor to OpenWrt, I don't like the whole: release one version of their proprietary fork of OpenWrt and then just do security fixes on top of that.
If they really want to focus on hardware and base everything on top of OpenWrt, it would be easier for them to upstream as much as possible and let the community handle updates. Even donating would be less expensive. It would be somewhat of a win-win situation IMO.
> I'm a big fan of OpenWRT. I switched to it after running pfSense for a lot of years. Anyone can donate to the project here: https://openwrt.org/donate
Would you care to go into why you chose it over pf/Opn Sense? Considering that you have to reinstall so it's not automatic, what makes it enough better to make the change worth your while?
I'm currently running OpnSense for my personal routing and firewalling needs, and considered OpenWRT a few weeks ago (for linux driver support, but that's another story). In the end, I changed my nic and kept opnsense.
Sure thing. I don't want to make any unfounded accusations, but I observed some unstable behavior on my pfSense installations. It wasn't clear if it had been hacked, or if it was just buggy, but it seemed more like a hack to me. Because it's installed as a proprietary blob from a "trusted" source, I couldn't do much troubleshooting. This was shortly after the opnSense mockery, which reduced my confidence in the professionalism of Netgate. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/ssk8zj/til_in_2017...
Also, while exploring other options, I found that OpenWRT provided much higher bandwidth on the same processor/memory footprint. I was able to reduce the VM CPU and memory allocations after switching.
Finally, there were a number of features I needed that pfSense just did not support. One was IGMP snooping, another was IPv6 using a provider tunnel.
I have tried two G.iNet devices. One completely stopped turning on, and the other the specs were so low it could barely keep up.
I've been using OpenWRT forever (WRT54G era) and only buy devices that can run OpenWRT. GL.iNet is my go-to out-of-the-box OpenWRT recommendation for others looking for a router. Their UI is a lot easier to use than LuCI for most things. I had a RPi-based Wireguard VPN setup to a family member's house, but I switched it out with a GL.iNet because their UI for managing Wireguard devices is so much easier. Especially since I can access it using their Goodcloud management portal from anywhere.
I hope OpenWRT pulls off having their own device. That would definitely be an upgrade from GL.iNet. But compared to getting a completely non-open firmware like every other GL.iNet competitor, even their versions of OpenWRT are a major step up.
There are a few of their devices that have upstream support in OpenWRT. But it is like buying any other device for running stock OpenWRT in that regard - you have to do your homework to make sure you get something compatible.
I still have OpenWRT running on a RPi4 'router' and 3 TP-Link routers as APs on my network. But still wish I could get GL.iNet's Wireguard management in Luci...
Call me crazy but I recall the Turris Omnia was 350 € last time I looked (~3 years ago). It could also take a fiber line as input, right?
Sounds about correct! I have one that I bought in 2018 but I remember it being more like 450+ € at the time.
I have had a fiber line connected during the whole time and it has served me well (I haven't done much customizing on it though, I have to admit. It's just the router for my home network).
Why would $100 be difficult? Router hardware is basically ancient arm cpus with five gigabit ethernet ports and wifi.
Because everything other than the ancient arm CPUs and ethernet ports requires expertise and capital.
First, that doesn't make sense when there are full modern system boards that sell for a fraction of that individually.
Second, why would you need something different that what routers are already doing? They are just trying to sell their own openWRT routers, the hardware has existed for a decade at or below $100, why would it be difficult for them to meet that?
They aren’t just trying to sell a router, they are trying to make available a fully open router without blobs right from boot, that is unbrickable, and selling it essentially at cost
Where are the numbers here? How does what you are saying connect to what is being talked about in a concrete way? You are talking about software and saying it has to cost $100 or more while there are $30 routers on amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082HH24YY/
This is more or less discussed in the link. They started looking at BananaPi products as a starting point, but have some requirements that existing boards don't fulfill. One in particular that probably precludes all of the $30 boards you're talking is:
"that this router isabeautiful (sic) example of excellent GPL/LGPL compliance"
These routers are crap. Anyone who cares a tiny bit about their wireless connectivity won't buy this. And I don't think OpenWRT wants to associate their name with "low-quality" routers.
What you are saying here is speculation. Most router's shortcoming is software. I've used cheap netgear routers with openwrt and they work incredibly well.
If you get up to mass-scale production quantities, $100 might be feasible. I imagine small-scale production with little up-front capital and no guaranteed market might be lot more challenging. It's not software, you're going to need large orders to get good prices.
I think about Meego/Jolla phone and tablet, Ubuntu Phone, Kobol Helios and tons of other projects that have either failed or are struggling due to market size and ecosystem.
I've been running a Turris Omnia for the last few years, which I've been fairly happy with. Network performance is about average and the platform as a whole is certainly due for an update, but stability has been great, it receives regular upgrades, and I'm happy to pay more for a project that has an open mindset. Not sure many feel the same way about commodity network hardware though.
Even brand new routers, with all their markup, shipping included, that can already run openwrt, can be $64
https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-AC1750-Smart-Router-Gigabit/d... https://openwrt.org/toh/netgear/r6350
Here is a new router for $30 with 5 gigabit ports and usb 3.0 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082HH24YY/
Anything with radio involves a ton of expensive certification work.
With something like a rpi that sells millions of units, that can be spread over way more units than something like this that (optimistically) gets sold to a few thousand nerds and that's it.
Well that's interesting. I see 2 possible outcomes, which aren't mutually exclusive:
1. They ship an excellent device. I mean, if they ship what they're describing, I'd buy it.
2. The commercial side of things corrupts and ruins the FOSS+community side of the project (see: CyanogenMod).
Hope the first one happens and the second one doesn't.
I think the second outcome is pretty much impossible. The device will be built and sold by BananaPi, which receives a license to the OpenWrt trademark in exchange for a $5-$10 donation per device sold. The OpenWrt project does not pay its developers, so the money will only be used to cover infrastructure costs.
Infrastructure costs for a project like openwrt could be nearly zero if the infrastructure was designed with cost in mind (site behind cloudflare, free tier in Aws/Google cloud for build bots, code on GitHub, etc).
You can probably run the whole thing for $100/year of unavoidable costs (eg. Domain registration).
> free tier in Aws/Google cloud for build bots
I think you're significantly underestimating the kind of resources a project like OpenWRT needs.
(Source: involved with CI/CD pipelines for other, smaller, FOSS projects, and those already need much more.)
Also did CI/CD on OSS projects and highly agree with this - CI/CD is not free, especially if it involves anything hardware related, which is likely in at least some subset of OpenWRT's cases.
As an OpenWRT user, I am very optimistic about this. I'm sure almost all users would fork in money for this instead of going for hostile mainstream companies.
Also the USB-C UART and recovery read-only bootloader is a nice touch. Really looking forward to it.
One concern is just misplaced anger because some users misunderstand what this means for OpenWRT going forward, but I hope they'll be in the minority.
> The OpenWrt project does not pay its developers,
This is actually surprising to me, but I guess the donation money isn't enough to pay developers. Would the surplus if infrastructure costs are covered go to developers or is it all going to a rainy day fund?
Maybe that money could be used for meet-up events and other activities that benefit the project and indirectly its contributors. That seems like a safe way to spend money without getting into trouble for paying some and not others, risking the open-source spirit of the project.
Yeah, it's probably not a great idea to pay developers with the donation money. I am not sure why I thought it was acceptable, but it is obvious now why this is a terrible idea.
Prolific devs could setup a Patreon/Librepay if they'd like, but that opens up its own can of worms like false expectations/entitlement of some donators. They might prefer not to do that for that reason alone.
It’s been done before. A decade ago, DD-WRT shipped on Buffalo routers from the factory with some custom additions.
(1) https://www.buffalotech.com/products/airstation-highpower-n3...
I still have one or two of Buffalo routers with DD-WRT lying around. I think I installed it manually though. They were good value for the money.
The Turris Omnia is canonically the "OpenWRT" router even though it isn't from OpenWRT itself: https://www.turris.com/en/omnia/overview/
I use a Beryl as a travel router (connects to Hotel or Plane Wifi, you authenticate the captive portal, then it creates a separate wifi network and opens a VPN tunnel). It's such a great little device for less than $100 and allows me to keep things a bit more secure, avoid config for each device, and on planes it allows us to split a higher capacity plan. All OpenWRT
While this and other GL.iNet devices use OpenWRT (with their own custom UI/frontend), they don't contribute to the OpenWRT project in terms of code or funding, many of their devices are incompatible with mainline OpenWRT releases, and software updates are few and far between.
I have one of these myself, they're handy devices, but I wouldn't go and recommend them as good OpenWRT devices.
I would love to buy into OpenWRT but I need a mesh router due to the size of my house. Do you know of the recommended hardware? I couldn't find anything the last time I searched a year or two ago
Yes! The GL-iNet B1300 is a cheap, powerful 802.11ac mesh router that is fully supported by OpenWRT: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-b1300/
It is also the platform I personally use for OpenWRT development work.
I'm stunned that it's something that unavailable and expensive.
I'd expect it to be some mass-produced cheap router.
Yes. In a heartbeat. If only to support OpenWRT.
Since the demise of Soekris and PC Engines, I don't know of good alternatives. I'd like to be excited about newer ARM-based, power sipping routers- but which ones aren't so cheaply made? The aformentioned companies hit that sweet spot- a 2-3x cost premium for industrial quality and an open approach. They were devoted to hardware and wasted no energy on branded forks of OpenWRT.
I'm curious to try some Teltonika products like the RUT series. They seem sparsely documented on the OpenWRT wiki, though.
Curious to hear any Soekris/PC Engines fans experience with newer stuff.
The $100 price tag is much less important to me than long term production runs. I hope they take a page from the pcengines playbook, and arrange to build this with minimal changes over a 5-10 year period.
For instance, I can imagine them holding all specs constant except that they ship a new wifi radio every 2-3 years.
This would allow other open source projects to target it and be rock solid. For instance, my pc engines openbsd router is something like 8 years old and has never crashed.
I’d happily pay a $50-100 premium to get a brand new board that’s fast enough, but that had all the bugs worked out the last few years.
It looks like at least one of the radios is on the same SoC as the CPU, Ethernet, etc., so swapping out just the radio every few years isn't quite feasible. Such highly-integrated WiFi SoCs are pretty standard for this price range, and getting a processor with enough PCIe and Ethernet to use only external MAC+PHY solutions is a lot more expensive.
The MT7976C they're including is a 3x3 WiFi 6 chip, and you can buy them as a standalone module for ~ $25. I think the idea is that it's providing the access point radio.
That's the part I'd suggest swapping out every few years. That might mean people are stuck with older bluetooth or a low performance WiFi radio or whatever on the SoC, but that won't impact performance much. (In the worst case, they could just disable the SoC radios to prevent RF interference with the "real" radio.)
I think this is intended to offer simultaneous dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) using two separate radios, as all decent APs for over a decade have done. The SoC provides one of the two radios, and the second is connected over PCIe. Whether your 2.4GHz or 5GHz radio more badly needs an upgrade in a few years can be hard to predict.
The MT7976C (AKA FiLogic 820) provides 2.4GHz and 5GHz. This article is about the 830:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/10/06/mediatek-unveils-fil...
I'm reasonably sure this line of chips is designed to be the only active radio in an access point:
> Filogic 830 packs a wide variety of features into a compact, ultra-low power 12nm SoC, allowing customers to design differentiated solutions for routers, access points and mesh systems. The SoC integrates four Arm Cortex-A53 processors operating at up to 2GHz per core for up to +18,000 DMIPs processing power, dual 4x4 Wi-Fi 6/6E for up to 6Gbps connectivity, two 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and a host of peripheral interfaces. Filogic 830’s built-in hardware acceleration engines for Wi-Fi offloading and networking enable faster and more reliable connectivity. In addition, the chipset also supports MediaTek FastPath™ technology for low latency applications such as gaming and AR/VR.
My reading of that is that the ARMs are there for software defined networking tasks, and not to run the router OS. I could be wrong. However, the OpenWRT spec lists this chip as a network adapter, not as the main SoC.
I think the "Filogic 820" branding may actually apply to the combination of the MT7981B SoC and the MT7976C NIC. https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/MediaTek seems to have actual detailed specs for these chips. It looks like the MT7981B is what has the ARM Cortex-A53 cores to run Linux, Ethernet, PCIe, and a 2x3:2 radio. The MT7976C is just a NIC with no application processor cores, but it has both a 2.4GHz and 5/6GHz radio. A NIC with two separate radios seems to be a relatively recent development, probably spurred by increased demand for tri-band routers after the opening of the 6GHz band.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a router which is supported by OpenWrt and has a functioning VDSL2 modem? I know I could get a standalone VDSL2 terminator or use another proprietary VDSL2 router in bridge mode in front of the OpenWrt based one, but that just means that the abandoned / buggy / vulnerable firmware lives one box further in my network.
BT Home Hub 5a, although you do need to disassemble it to flash.
https://openwrt.org/toh/bt/homehub_v5a
I would also be interested to connect my DSL cable directly to a device with OpenWRT on it that doesn't cost $500+. I currently have a separate device as my modem, DrayTek Vigor 166. In case someone is wondering who's still using VDSL in 2024, that would be most of Germany.