And all it took was forcing one company to divulge its proprietary closed-source codebase because they screwed up and incorporated copyleft code deep into their core.
Imagine how much progress could be made if a few other companies were forced to crack open their proprietary closed-source codebases...
Where does Ubiquiti use OpenWRT? I saw that claim elsewhere in this thread but I'm pretty sure their original devices were based on Vyatta, and their newer stuff is a custom Linux OS of their own that is loosely Debian-flavored. Poking around in the terminal all the Ubiquiti devices I have used are very clearly unrelated to OpenWRT.
Ubiquiti started in outdoor wireless, point to point and point to multipoint. All their outdoor radios, cameras, and unifi APs are all running a version of openwrt.
EdgeRouters started on vayatta and then that went away (AT&T acquired Vayatta) and then that forked into VyOS.
Some of the Ubiquiti EdgeSwitches are running some other OS, but I can't remember what it was.
Source - Spent 14 years helping alpha / beta test, debug code and wireless problems, etc.
I assume that about 20% to 50% of the home routers, Access points and Wifi mesh devices sold world wide are based on OpenWrt. Often some old versions of OpenWrt with many vendor modifications, the UI is always custom.
I know that the main vendor SDKs from Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Maxlinear are based on OpenWrt. I think only Broadcom uses an own Linux distribution which is not based on OpenWrt in their main SDK. Linux has a market share of about 99% in this market, I haven't seen VxWorks in any recent home router or access point.
OpenWrt is what I use. I picked my routers specifically to be well supported by OpenWrt, immediately wiped whatever the original firmware and installed OpenWrt and that was about ten years ago. Then when I replaced the hardware I also looked for a compatible model with OpenWrt and did the same.
I never had any issue with OpenWrt which I couldn't solve and it just works. Its uptime is pretty much the uptime since when the power goes out due to storms and such.
But I wished there was something similar but for "big" (in a relative sense) devices. I feel lot of the constraints OpenWrt is based on are not really that applicable when you have hundreds of megabytes of flash and RAM, and that is starting to become a common thing for routers these days. Even their own OpenWrt One router has 256M flash and a full gigabyte of RAM. That is not all that resource constrained anymore. What I would love is to have something that would be closer to "normal" linux distro while getting the networking goodies and ease of configuration from OpenWrt.
I'm a staunch defender of OpenWRT. Having used just about every "router distro" folks care to name (remember SmoothWall?) for the last 20~ years, OpenWRT is built like a tank and just keeps trundling along
I hope their experiments with the "OpenWRT One" keep going. I'd love to see OpenWRT take a (deserved) bite out of the "SMB firewall vendors" like Netgate or OPNsense. Or just undercutting Wi-Fi vendors like Ubiquiti who base their work on OpenWRT anyway
Something I'm excited to try myself in future is running "OpenWISP" [1] to manage a small fleet (three) OpenWRT devices in parallel for a deployment in a shared workshop. This seems to also be something that OpenWRT could be better at integrating, but it's nice to see "a vendor" tackling it
Installed it on a TP-Link to replace my ISP router a couple days ago. I'm super impressed with how it needed almost no config (except to manually activate the Wifi and to set a password).
I'd recommend downloading the Material theme for anyone complaining about the barebones look.
Another option (depending on your requirements) is to use normal "workstation" Linux distro like Debian on an regular x86 PC equipped with two NICs. I added an SFP28 dual NIC to an old gaming PC and now use it as a router/home server and can saturate the link (25Gbps). I get north of 4Gbps through Wireguard too. Routing and the firewall are built into the kernel so you don't really need a specific distro. I just added a DNS server (Unbound in recursive mode) and a DHCP server. For WiFi I use hostapd, but an external AP would be a better solution for most people.
Did you manage to get IPv6 prefix delegation working with dynamic prefixes? Best solution I found involves scripting to re-build config files and restart a daemon, where OpenWRT just does it out of the box.
> In our hyper-connected world, we've become slaves to the endless scroll. Social media, news, videos - the algorithm-driven content feeds are designed to capture and hold our attention indefinitely. We tell ourselves "just 5 more minutes" but hours disappear. Our brains are being rewired for constant stimulation, making us less capable of deep thought, genuine connection, and meaningful work.
> The Big Internet Button breaks this cycle by introducing friction back into your internet consumption.
Openwrt still has some strange footguns (imo) and the upgrade process is painful. I personally just prefer running general-purpose distros for my routing and firewalling needs. I realize the learning curve for this for someone who just wants a home router is unrealistic though :)
But out of all the router/firewall distros, OpenWRT it is by far the best.
Been a fan for a long time and use it on my Archer C7, but I had to disable hardware switching in order to use SQM, and now the switching performance is <200mbps. Having recently upgraded to home fiber, I'm probably going to get a native Unifi router.
Openwrt is amazing. I had a wrt54gs, and then latter got a Netgear wgt634u with an astounding USB2 port! Served as a great office shoutcast playing server for the office, a decade before Sonos (for example) existed.
The hardware situation has felt very tenuous for years now. Qualcomm support has felt so so bodged in. It feels perpetually like "this new chipset will finally get us past all the horrible half working hacks of the last barely working chipset" on and on, usually sort of working but only barely. I did finally get my IPQ8074A based router going (rax120) but it took so long, and needs an older wifi firmware (their 2.7) to work. But it feels like maybe slowly it could be getting better, maybe perhaps support will be more mainline less hacked next time.
It's good to see MediaTek present in openwrt space. One of the only other highly present chipsets available. The price is often quite good for pretty new wifi standard supporting routers. The anec-data I've heard is that driver maturity is not great, but at least there's motion & movement within the kernel, which springs hope eternal.
I've been following OpenWRT for years, and finally made the jump.
This was after using DD-WRT and various flavors of Tomato (especially Shibby and FreshTomato) for two decades on probably ~100 routers in various locations. Some of those locations were business production environments, with the routers providing VPN connecting sites across the continent as a backbone for VOIP telephony, remote user access, etc. (before the likes of Tailscale).
It's an important project and I have a great appreciation for all the work the developers have put into it. But I have to admit, I was underwhelmed. LuCI wasn't as robust as I expected (the "queue all your changes as a batch of commands" approach is a great idea, but its implementation has some rough edges that simply don't work - IIRC, where the UI isn't aware of conflicting config changes you've already queued). And I found in practice getting it to do things that are easy and reliable on FreshTomato, was frustratingly unintuitive, taking more steps than I'd expect, some seeming brittle/error-prone. I'm not averse to scripting, having written short novels of commands for previous OS's, and even custom-compiled binaries (e.g. to install iPerf, before it was bundled with the OS) and a whole custom FreshTomato build that added some admin pages for long-term bandwidth/latency graphing. So I'm open to learning new things, I just felt like I was doing more fighting with the OS than should be necessary.
One small example was configuring a Let's Encrypt certificate. This feels like it should be a near one-click operation. In my case it took a bit of testing and tweaking to get right - I wound up contributing my short solution back to a SuperUser answer: https://superuser.com/a/1904844/75522
Properly disabling IPv6 took more than just a checkbox. I had "No default route present, overriding ra_lifetime to 0!" messages logged, until I added "net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1" to /etc/sysctl.conf.
Maybe I'm just getting snagged by doing things in 'weird' ways. e.g. My inaugural router on it is a MikroTik wAP ac. Turns out you don't get a WAN interface out of the box when flashed on that device, and I had to manually create it. There wasn't really any documentation warning about that, and it took a while before I realized life would go better if I used a lowercase rather than uppercase convention (for better integration with built-in stuff that relies on its existence).
A lingering issue I haven't figured out yet is how to make a reliable "toggle switch" to turn on and off access to the internet for one device on my network (by IP or MAC address). I set up a firewall rule, but wind up having to manually run "/etc/init.d/firewall reload" and "conntrack -D ..." each time to kill any established connections. On FreshTomato it was just a checkbox you turn on/off. If anyone has advice on this I'd be grateful.
One last tip for anyone else using it on a router plugged into a Starlink endpoint that's in bypass mode (i.e. you want to be able to port forward). You'll get messages in syslog every 5 minutes due to short-lived Starlink IP:
daemon.notice netifd: wan (####): udhcpc: sending renew to server
daemon.notice netifd: wan (####): udhcpc: lease of ###.###.###.# obtained from ###.###.###.#, lease time 300
You can suppress them by appending "-l 1" (without quotes) to the "procd_set_param command /sbin/netifd" line in /etc/init.d/network, then reboot the router (in my case running "/etc/init.d/network reload" didn't quite do it). On the plus side, the Dynamic DNS package is working well in my setup. (And yes, I understand the implications of using Let&#...
Fond memories of PirateBox.
Actually, fondness is directly proportional to which router I was hacking
- Thumbs down for TP-Link
- Many thumbs up for the GLI AR150, the sweetest of spots (hugging face emoji)
All my accesspoints and routers run OpenWRT. Love it.
At some point I even ported OpenWRT to my unsupported tplink device. IIRC I hacked together a devicetree and made some small modifications to the tplink loader code.
Funnily enough when I made a PR on github it was basically ignored after I implemented the feedback. I proceed to instead send the patch to the mailinglist and it was merged the same day without comment. That must be some kind of skill filter...
I just started using OpenWrt on Incus via LXC and it works really well. The most difficult part was just learning the config file. It looks like upgrading OpenWrt (esp. on LXC) is the tricky part though so not looking forward to that. I considered moving it to a VM so upgrading it is easier but it runs so smooth on Incus.
42 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 59.6 ms ] threadImagine how much progress could be made if a few other companies were forced to crack open their proprietary closed-source codebases...
EdgeRouters started on vayatta and then that went away (AT&T acquired Vayatta) and then that forked into VyOS.
Some of the Ubiquiti EdgeSwitches are running some other OS, but I can't remember what it was.
Source - Spent 14 years helping alpha / beta test, debug code and wireless problems, etc.
I know that the main vendor SDKs from Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Maxlinear are based on OpenWrt. I think only Broadcom uses an own Linux distribution which is not based on OpenWrt in their main SDK. Linux has a market share of about 99% in this market, I haven't seen VxWorks in any recent home router or access point.
Otherwise it Just Works™, as it should.
OpenWrt Upgrade Tool. retaining all of your currently installed packages and configuration
They are updating kernels on yearly basis. 6.12 WIP
web interface for mobile. I think there is an unoffical luci package and a native mobile app.
Notification system. WIP
See also https://forum.openwrt.org/t/community-question-what-do-you-w...
Not to bell the cat, but some sort of symbolic build for the WRT54G(L) should still be possible… right?
also, I think the linksys wrt1900 supported openwrt when it came out. (not perfectly, but they tried)
It’s not user friendly at all.
I never had any issue with OpenWrt which I couldn't solve and it just works. Its uptime is pretty much the uptime since when the power goes out due to storms and such.
But I wished there was something similar but for "big" (in a relative sense) devices. I feel lot of the constraints OpenWrt is based on are not really that applicable when you have hundreds of megabytes of flash and RAM, and that is starting to become a common thing for routers these days. Even their own OpenWrt One router has 256M flash and a full gigabyte of RAM. That is not all that resource constrained anymore. What I would love is to have something that would be closer to "normal" linux distro while getting the networking goodies and ease of configuration from OpenWrt.
I hope their experiments with the "OpenWRT One" keep going. I'd love to see OpenWRT take a (deserved) bite out of the "SMB firewall vendors" like Netgate or OPNsense. Or just undercutting Wi-Fi vendors like Ubiquiti who base their work on OpenWRT anyway
Something I'm excited to try myself in future is running "OpenWISP" [1] to manage a small fleet (three) OpenWRT devices in parallel for a deployment in a shared workshop. This seems to also be something that OpenWRT could be better at integrating, but it's nice to see "a vendor" tackling it
[1] https://openwisp.org/
I'd recommend downloading the Material theme for anyone complaining about the barebones look.
> In our hyper-connected world, we've become slaves to the endless scroll. Social media, news, videos - the algorithm-driven content feeds are designed to capture and hold our attention indefinitely. We tell ourselves "just 5 more minutes" but hours disappear. Our brains are being rewired for constant stimulation, making us less capable of deep thought, genuine connection, and meaningful work.
> The Big Internet Button breaks this cycle by introducing friction back into your internet consumption.
But out of all the router/firewall distros, OpenWRT it is by far the best.
The hardware situation has felt very tenuous for years now. Qualcomm support has felt so so bodged in. It feels perpetually like "this new chipset will finally get us past all the horrible half working hacks of the last barely working chipset" on and on, usually sort of working but only barely. I did finally get my IPQ8074A based router going (rax120) but it took so long, and needs an older wifi firmware (their 2.7) to work. But it feels like maybe slowly it could be getting better, maybe perhaps support will be more mainline less hacked next time.
One very recent example that's lovely to see is Qualcomm starting to mainline their Packet Processing Engine, for the IPQ9574 at least. Link and example hardware below. There have been various forks of openwrt that bundle in cobbled together versions of the software to use hardware offload/accelerators, lots of these. But it's been far from problemfree and are hard to maintain, especially trying to maintain kernel compatibility. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-PPE-Driver-Linux-6.18 https://www.524wifi.com/index.php/embedded-cpu-boards/dual-r... https://forum.openwrt.org/t/ipq806x-nss-build-netgear-r7800-...
It's good to see MediaTek present in openwrt space. One of the only other highly present chipsets available. The price is often quite good for pretty new wifi standard supporting routers. The anec-data I've heard is that driver maturity is not great, but at least there's motion & movement within the kernel, which springs hope eternal.
This was after using DD-WRT and various flavors of Tomato (especially Shibby and FreshTomato) for two decades on probably ~100 routers in various locations. Some of those locations were business production environments, with the routers providing VPN connecting sites across the continent as a backbone for VOIP telephony, remote user access, etc. (before the likes of Tailscale).
It's an important project and I have a great appreciation for all the work the developers have put into it. But I have to admit, I was underwhelmed. LuCI wasn't as robust as I expected (the "queue all your changes as a batch of commands" approach is a great idea, but its implementation has some rough edges that simply don't work - IIRC, where the UI isn't aware of conflicting config changes you've already queued). And I found in practice getting it to do things that are easy and reliable on FreshTomato, was frustratingly unintuitive, taking more steps than I'd expect, some seeming brittle/error-prone. I'm not averse to scripting, having written short novels of commands for previous OS's, and even custom-compiled binaries (e.g. to install iPerf, before it was bundled with the OS) and a whole custom FreshTomato build that added some admin pages for long-term bandwidth/latency graphing. So I'm open to learning new things, I just felt like I was doing more fighting with the OS than should be necessary.
One small example was configuring a Let's Encrypt certificate. This feels like it should be a near one-click operation. In my case it took a bit of testing and tweaking to get right - I wound up contributing my short solution back to a SuperUser answer: https://superuser.com/a/1904844/75522
Properly disabling IPv6 took more than just a checkbox. I had "No default route present, overriding ra_lifetime to 0!" messages logged, until I added "net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1" to /etc/sysctl.conf.
Maybe I'm just getting snagged by doing things in 'weird' ways. e.g. My inaugural router on it is a MikroTik wAP ac. Turns out you don't get a WAN interface out of the box when flashed on that device, and I had to manually create it. There wasn't really any documentation warning about that, and it took a while before I realized life would go better if I used a lowercase rather than uppercase convention (for better integration with built-in stuff that relies on its existence).
A lingering issue I haven't figured out yet is how to make a reliable "toggle switch" to turn on and off access to the internet for one device on my network (by IP or MAC address). I set up a firewall rule, but wind up having to manually run "/etc/init.d/firewall reload" and "conntrack -D ..." each time to kill any established connections. On FreshTomato it was just a checkbox you turn on/off. If anyone has advice on this I'd be grateful.
One last tip for anyone else using it on a router plugged into a Starlink endpoint that's in bypass mode (i.e. you want to be able to port forward). You'll get messages in syslog every 5 minutes due to short-lived Starlink IP:
You can suppress them by appending "-l 1" (without quotes) to the "procd_set_param command /sbin/netifd" line in /etc/init.d/network, then reboot the router (in my case running "/etc/init.d/network reload" didn't quite do it). On the plus side, the Dynamic DNS package is working well in my setup. (And yes, I understand the implications of using Let&#...No EU vendor?
Apparently the firmware is shipped without the GUI (LUCI). And only 900 units have been sold in 10 months. Something fishy is going on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/1h0pkbw/openwrt_on...
At some point I even ported OpenWRT to my unsupported tplink device. IIRC I hacked together a devicetree and made some small modifications to the tplink loader code.
Funnily enough when I made a PR on github it was basically ignored after I implemented the feedback. I proceed to instead send the patch to the mailinglist and it was merged the same day without comment. That must be some kind of skill filter...