The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 10, 2024 10:55 UTC (Wed) by luna (guest, #166424)
In reply to: The OpenWrt One project by mtaht
Parent article: The OpenWrt One project

> It is the first time I have felt hopeful about open source wifi in a long time! I had given up a year or two back.

Why? There are plenty of fast, wifi 6-capable devices that support openwrt, and also several SBCs you can put a real Linux distro on (including, coincidentally, the Banana Pi BPI-R3 I'm using as an access point for the laptop I'm typing this on). I can just about saturate my gigabit home connection with the BPI-R3, and it's running a full Linux distro that works just like anything else. There's even official openwrt support for the SBC I'm using. I can't fathom why you'd use it instead of a full Linux distro, but the support is there if you want it.

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 10, 2024 12:18 UTC (Wed) by wsy (subscriber, #121706) [Link] (1 responses)

Can't agree more. Regular linux distro is easier to work with than Openwrt if you want something more complex than a home router. The uci config system is a layer of indirection that's often in my way.

For people just want a home router, I still recommend Openwrt.

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 16, 2024 4:43 UTC (Tue) by parametricpoly (subscriber, #143903) [Link]

The openwrt build system is even worse. I've tried to enable simple things like dvb drivers in the kernel because openwrt comes with tvheadend but no tv / dvb kernel drivers. So, enabling that works, but if you make other changes, it's highly likely the whole build process fails. It's a disaster.

The OpenWrt One project

Posted Jan 10, 2024 15:28 UTC (Wed) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]

The bpi-r3 is a great looking board. Yay! SFPs! (btw, I view the lack of FOSS gpon support as one of the biggest problems we have going forward across fiber and i wish we could get some focus on that)

It is priced well too, at $106.

The market is big enough to support that. I am not involved with the openwrt one project at all, the parts that I am supportive of is the upstream first reference router approach, openwrt(tm) support, the form factor, and especially the good wifi for a pi-form factor. I think it can be cost-reduced quite a lot over time, too.

I like all the progress that has been made on the mt76 and now mt79 chipsets - the scars I have from the ath10k still ache, and let´s not talk about broadcom...

As for the underlying OS, don´t care. I would love to see a million-seller good-wifi anything that is not a broadcom-raspi, leveraging modern kernels. A reference router of any sort, kept up to date, by a chipset maker could reshape the market.