The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 10, 2024 6:58 UTC (Wed) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
Parent article: The OpenWrt One project

Note: the mail author needs to find another keyboard or to fix his space bar, the message is a bit difficult to read, at least 15 spaces are missing between words, except in the specs which were likely copy-pasted from their discussions.

I'm surprised they went with HT42B534-2 for the UART while the well-known and ubiquitous CH340-E is both smaller and cheaper ($342 vs $383 per 1000). The HT also only supports CDC-ACM which apparently requires a driver sometimes while the CH340 presents a USB TTY device, but maybe the HT has other benefits I ignore.

Also a bit disappointed to see only two ports for a router. That's the entry-level offering that you find on $25 devices. I would have connected a switch chip to explode the 2.5G port to 5 LAN ports to offer a bit more flexibility. And controlling switch chips is one of the strengths of OpenWRT, no ? Look at the EdgeRouter-X for example, it has been providing five GbE ports for ~$50 for 7 years or so, and more recently we've bought at work for $80 a 4G+WiFi+4 GbE ports router, so it's not as if it were that much of a cost problem by now! And forcing users to buy an extra manageable 2.5G switch to provide just one DMZ will cost them much more and will be more complicated to use.

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 10, 2024 7:43 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

I think all modern operating systems ship with a CDC-ACM driver, while other USB-serial chipsets tend to require a chipset-specific driver that tends to be shipped separately.

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 10, 2024 7:50 UTC (Wed) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

It's true that usbtty usually is chip-specific, then that can indeed be a valid reason.

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 10, 2024 13:36 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (6 responses)

> Also a bit disappointed to see only two ports for a router.

I'm not surprised. Anecdotally, Over the past decade or so, I can't think of any "non-techie" I've seen with a home router that has anything other than the ISP/WAN plugged into it. It's WiFi for everything.

Personally, I've not used more than two ports on _any_ of the [usually ISP-supplied] routers I've had over the past two decades -- ie the upstream/WAN/ISP, and the local LAN. Not that I've never needed more LAN ports; The combined facts that the router typically tends to be located next to the ISP demarcation point, not where I have the rest/bulk of my equipment, and that I need many more ports than a "home router" would ever be able to provide. That, and I greatly prefer to use dedicated wifi access points in a bridge-only mode, which only requires a single LAN port. Anything more would be wasted, so why drive up the BoM?

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 10, 2024 14:18 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (5 responses)

When I bought the place I'm living in now, I had Ethernet drops put in before I moved in all my stuff. When you work remotely, doing Zoom over wired Ethernet is way more pleasant than doing it over WiFi.

However, I realize I'm in the tiny minority. If you need more Ethernet ports, gigabit switches are dirt cheap. Probably even 2.5Gb switches aren't too bad.

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 10, 2024 14:40 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I had a couple of ethernet drops put in when our house was re-wired. Then BT scrapped ISDN, and moved phone point for ADSL. Later on they migrated us to fibre, and put it in next to the ADSL point not the old point. So my ethernet drops now need a cable running across the floor (or rather tucked in to the skirting :-(

I mostly run EoP now ...

Cheers,
Wol

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 10, 2024 16:26 UTC (Wed) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

The thing is that it requires a manageable switch if you need to add a separate LAN. I agree that most users don't setup VLANs nor DMZs. But there are definitely a non negligible amount who do. And OpenWRT is not for the random joe user, random joe just buys a branded router off-the-shelf and doesn't even try to reflash it. I know quite some people who want to isolate kids and parents on different networks, or the local NAS storage from the LAN due to the fear of losing everything in case of a crypto virus, or those who play with IoT devices or a camera to monitor their garden and entrance who don't trust it enough to plug it on the LAN etc. I'm not asking for the 5 port device by default, but at least 3 is very common around me.

And when you look at cheap routers like tp-link, gl-inet etc, you notice that only the entry level (i.e. less than $50) has 2 ports. There's definitely some non-negligible demand, and at least it creates some competition against this specific more expensive and less capable device.

An OpenWrt switch to complement the OpenWrt One

Posted Jan 11, 2024 12:31 UTC (Thu) by tim_small (guest, #35401) [Link]

OpenWRT now runs on a variety of cheap RTL83xx and RTL93xx SoC managed switches, so you could always pair one of those with an OpenWrt One... e.g.

Zyxel XGS1010-12 (8x 1 Gbit Ethernet, 2x 2.5 Gbit Ethernet, 2x 10 Gbit SFP+) - circa €120 new.

HP / HPE 1920-24G JG924A (24x 1 Gbit Ethernet, 4x 1 Gbit SFP) - circa €20 used.

...both examples have pretty good energy efficient and thus fan-less BTW.

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 11, 2024 20:19 UTC (Thu) by rknight (subscriber, #26792) [Link] (1 responses)

And OpenWrt now has support for quite a few Realtek SOC based Gigabit Ethernet switches. See https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_extended_all and search for Device type 'Switch'.

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 12, 2024 9:29 UTC (Fri) by tim_small (guest, #35401) [Link]

Quite a few of the RTL83xx and 93xx switches which have complete (or WiP) OpenWrt support don't yet have ToH entries - but should be documented on this developer's wiki.