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CursedSilicon
pseudosavant
Ease of managing multiple OpenWRT devices is still its weakest link. OpenWRT is device centric, but I don't want to managed devices, I want to manage a network.
Modern mesh WiFi systems I've seen do that so well. I know in theory that I could create a VLAN + SSID on my OpenWRT router and APs just for iot devices to only access the internet. But setting that up on a TP-Link mesh was a couple of taps in their app. Doing it on my OpenWRT devices would be quite a bit more hassle.
pseudosavant
Thinking about this more, I doubt I'll setup any OpenWRT APs on my network going forward. Most of the things I like about OpenWRT, and need it for, are related to being my router. My OpenWRT APs are just "dumb" APs. Wifi is off on the router.
For the APs, I could use a mesh kit like the TP-Link Deco unit I installed for a friend recently. Super easy setup, reasonable price (cheaper than equivalent OpenWRT hardware I'd buy), wired backhaul up to 2.5Gbps.
elliotf
To offer a contrasting viewpoint, I don't have openwrt as my router, but only have openwrt APs, because it's the best and cheapest way to have VLAN support in my APs, keeping iot and guest VLANs separate from my main network.
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m463
There might be a workaround for some people - get a big openwrt switch.
Openwrt supports the zyxel gs1900 switch, which goes up to 48 ports.
neilv
At home, I built an OPNsense box to evaluate (using Sophos XG135 Rev 3 hardware, along with an OpenWrt nice Netgear WiFi AP on POE), but then went back to a plastic OpenWrt all-in-one box.
OPNsense (and pfSense) are neat, but I personally don't need an IDS/IPS right now, and I like to be able to run the router fanless.
One thing that OpenWrt could use immediately, for basic home WiFi router functionality, is easier ways to add guest-like VLANs from the Luci Web-based admin UI. (I currently have a guest VLAN config that I partly cargo-culted with numerous steps in Luci years ago, largely based on a blog post, and that would be a pain to reconstruct on a new install.)
For techies whose households include non-techies, a little IDS/IPS could help keep some nasty traffic off your home Internet pipe, and I suppose that could now run alongside OpenWrt on some of the more powerful plastic boxes, or on a PC with the right WiFi devices/APs. (In addition to use of VLANs and routing to minimize damage from all the malware-infested devices, and also thinking "zero trust" for the techie stuff you run.)
tw04
>I like to be able to run the router fanless.
You don't need a fan for OPNsense or pfSense? Plenty of folks running protectli boxes without a fan, they're one of the most popular platforms for both OS'
gonzopancho
the entire desktop line from Netgate is fanless.
akaitea
> a little IDS/IPS could help keep some nasty traffic off your home Internet pipe
the adblock package does a great job of blocking ads and other nasty stuff, it doesn't have fancy statistics or an interface like Pi-hole but it does its job without complaining
fidotron
I definitely believe people underestimate the potential of OpenWRT as an app platform. Before getting sidelined with work I did some proof of concept WebRTC SFU on it https://github.com/atomirex/umbrella which worked surprisingly well.
Was also surprised, then not surprised, to learn it's used as the front end on many of the new generation of 3D printers.
jasonjayr
I have a bunch of old WD MyBook Live NAS drives (PowerPC CPU) from an older project, and was surprised that OpenWRT was the best way to get a modern linux on them:
https://openwrt.org/toh/western_digital/mybooklive
They're slow, but great for stuff that doesn't need to be fast.
hungmung
> I hope their experiments with the "OpenWRT One" keep going.
OpenWRT Two is scheduled for late 2025 from GL.iNet and should go for ~$250.
foepys
OpenWISP states in its docs that you should be running at least 20 devices to make it worth it. [1] So it's not supposed to be a easy way to manage a few devices for home users.
> However, OpenWISP may not be the best fit for very small networks (fewer than 20 devices), organizations lacking IT expertise, or enterprises seeking open-source alternatives solely for cost-saving purposes.
rubenbe
It's for exactly that reason I started with OpenSOHO. It is targeted towards the typical home and small office network with less than 20 OpenWRT devices. (although there is no hard limit).
https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho
It is still a work in progress, but it is easy to deploy (one golang binary based on pocketbase)
pseudosavant
Very interesting project! I was thinking of something that would fill this gap.
Based on your experience, as OpenSOHO seems to use OpenWISP, what do you wish you knew about OpenWISP before you started this?
CursedSilicon
This looks a lot closer to what I'm after. Bookmarked the git repo :)
CursedSilicon
I saw that. Admittedly I'm only interested in a few of its functions. Namely roaming and guest hotspots
I could wire up all of that manually. But I'm excited for the chance to learn something new
1vuio0pswjnm7
"Or just undercutting Wi-Fi vendors like Ubiquiti who basse their work on OpenWRT anyway."
Not sure about today, but this company used to sell hardware whose capabilities were IIRC only "fully enabled" if the buyer used the company's closed source OS. An open source OS might work with the hardware but the buyer would not get the same performance.
At the time, the HN comments continuously supported this company. It appeared that for these commmenters, this was a worthwhile sacrifice. They would just keep recommending Ubiquiti. (Unsolicted recommendations)
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nottorp
We once delivered a totally not router box running openwrt, just because it was very simple and bastardising openwrt was easier than yocto.
whalesalad
Related, I used to love going to the monowall website gallery to see all the labgore. It's still there like a time capsule: https://m0n0.ch/wall/gallery.php
rdtsc
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.
drpixie
Same. Been running OpenWrt for years now. I select hardware that runs OpenWrt and never (well, only once, truely) have had to reboot a device due crashing. That old "reboot your router" is just not a thing (touch wood).
I'm sure it helps that all my infrastructure is on a UPS. I've found that even Raspberry Pis can be long-term reliable servers, running ubuntu server and on the UPS.
Another thing that seems to help. I separate function. One box functions only as the router. The wifi boxes only provide wifi endpoints - they do not do routing. And so on.
gardnr
I have my fibre ont and the wifi router on a cheap battery backup. It has always continued to work even during extended power outages.
Viability1936
What hardware did you go with? I was thinking of getting the second most recent glinet to run openwrt, but haven't convinced myself it's worth it since my current tplink is still pretty new and is just be getting it to tinker (I don't currently even run any vlans or anything fancy)
rdtsc
I went with a TP-Link Archer C7 V2. It's quite dated by now, but it's been sitting quietly in the closet and working for all these years and I am still happy with it. My speeds are also not that fast, I only pay for 100Mbps so something faster might overwhelm this hardware. I also don't have anything fancy on it, no vlans just a few wifi networks on 2.4ghz and 5ghz, some wired devices, and two usb drivers which I access via ssh (these do require I install a few extra packages to allow mounting them).
emeril
I've had the same for a number of years - mine is even more vanilla than yours
rock solid
bananaboy
I run openwrt on an ancient Netgear WNDR3700 which is probably 15 years old by now. I can get around 900Mbps on my gigabit connection (wired). We only have two adults in our home using the Internet (for now until our two kids are older!) and it’s been totally fine for us. openwrt is a great way breath extra life into older routers. A lot of homes don’t really need anything fancy or recent.
opan
Seconding all this. Ever since I had weird problems with the vendor firmware on a router, I just pick hardware I can put OpenWrt on right away. Works great.
mifydev
OpenWRT is such a good os for a router - simple but configurable UI, works reliably, I wish router companies would just ship it by default
mifydev
But then you get annoying firmware providers like Broadcom who refuse to write OSS drivers for linux and a lot of work is being spent on the reverse engineering
bcm4702
The amusing thing about that is that broadcom, not Cisco, was the culprit in the original WRT54G GPL violation. Cisco, of course, were legally liable and should have checked that the code they obtained was not encumbered - although the usual way to do that is to specify contractually that your vendor will do the checking. It was a huge issue for them that they had tripped a customer who provided a significant fraction of their revenue into legal difficulties. I suspect that to this day, a big reason that parts of broadcom are reluctant to open-source stuff is because certain executives are still angry about the experience.
haukem
MediaTek chips are well supported by OpenWrt. Broadcom is not good supported. Mainline Linux kernel supports recent MediaTek Wifi chips quite well [1]. MediaTek is also working on these upstream Linux drivers, but they still have a proprietary Linux driver in addition.
Also the rest of the recent MediaTek SoC is supported quite well by upstream Linux and OpenWrt.
You can run OpenWrt on recent MediaTek SoCs with all code running on the main CPU being open source, no closed source code needed inside the Linux kernel address space or in user space. The chips need firmware running directly on the IP cores. It needs a firmware running on the wifi core itself, there are probably one or more CPUs inside the wifi cores doing real time stuff. The Ethernet PHYs also need a firmware which is running on the PHY.
[1]: https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.17-rc5/source/drivers/ne...
pbasista
Ok, but this should not be a major limiting factor.
From my experience, there is sufficient amount of routers based on well-supported chips which work okay with OpenWRT.
When I consider to buy a new router, I go to the OpenWRT device support page, filter for features I would like to get and choose one of the supported routers listed there.
fiddlerwoaroof
I gave up on openwrt when I realized that a lot of the recent WiFi standards seem to be badly supported. I think 802.11ac was significantly faster with vendor firmware than openwrt, for example.
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echelon
Can we accept a pragmatic world where we have OSS + binary blobs?
That's better than a fully commercial world or a fully "pure" world with no functionality.
haukem
OpenWrt accepts binary only firmware running outside of the Linux kernel address space on the wifi chip itself. This matches what upstream Linux also accepts. This works well with most recent Wifi drivers. OpenWrt does not accapt binary only kernel modules or binary only userspace applications, they are very hard to maintain if you do not have the source code.
This works well with Mediatek and also Qualcomm and most other vendors.
wtallis
GPU vendors have come to the realization that the in-kernel driver needs to be open-source, but the userspace portion can be closed-source. There's just really no good reason to accept a design where outdated closed-source drivers could keep you from running a current kernel. WiFi NIC vendors have for generations been moving more complexity into the closed-source firmware blob that runs on the NIC's own processor core(s), so there's no good reason for the kernel driver to remain closed-source.
mifydev
I would love that, but it seems like they are not doing that either
trelane
> That's better than a fully commercial world or a fully "pure" world with no functionality.
I would prefer a fully open world with full functionality.
opan
Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. Things would be even worse if people didn't care about blobs.
m463
There are some low-cost routers on amazon that do.
also, I think the linksys wrt1900 supported openwrt when it came out. (not perfectly, but they tried)
zokier
I love OpenWrt.
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.
thisislife2
I have the opposite complaint. I wish OpenWRT ran on low-resource routers like those really cheap TP-link ones. DD-WRT does support a few of it, and my personal opinion is that it is better optimised than OpenWRT. By the way, you should explore OpenBSD ( https://openbsdrouterguide.net/ ).
imiric
Thanks for the OpenBSD guide.
Do you know whether 10Gb NICs are supported in OpenBSD, and can the link be fully saturated?
I'd be interested in building a DIY router on OpenBSD, but I need support for 10Gb SFP+, with an upgrade path beyond that.
thisislife2
Yes. Support is there for some 10Gb Intel devices ( https://man.openbsd.org/ix.4 ) and Broadcom devices ( https://man.openbsd.org/bnxt.4 ) including SFP+.
zokier
Yeah, I know openbsd is a thing. I just like Linux too much.
jauntywundrkind
Strongly agreed. I'd rather be running a Debian, with systemd, and boring regular utilities, than the bespoke environment openwrt has crafted together.
I'm super glad openwrt exists, and their uci config predates systemd's attempt to build a cohesive consistent whole system configuration pattern & is epic, but given the capabilities of these systems it feels so worthwhile to de-specialize the environment, to make it more boring.
What I really want is Kubernetes oriented tools that can manage hostapd & something like dawn or openert's usteer for band/ap steering. And some other ancillary wifi tools. Maybe maybe a setup for radius/enterprise, instead of just psk. You can do so much more with it, but at its core openwrt is 90% packaging for openwrt. It's not even particularly super well tuned hostapd: theres so much wireless config one can go try & enable that really is just additional 802.11 specs hostapd supports, they may improve your openwrt wifi experience.
freetime2
> I'd rather be running a Debian, with systemd, and boring regular utilities, than the bespoke environment openwrt has crafted together.
I agree. I tried running OpenWrt as a wired router on an x86 mini PC, and found that it had some really powerful features and was certainly rock solid as a router. But there were some major annoyances, too. For example, their documentation includes a script for expanding the root filesystem [1] that left my system unable to boot. And while I didn't use it long enough to make it through an upgrade, their documentation on upgrades makes the process sound very brittle (it sounded like configs for installed packages don't carry over by default) and confusing.
I thought about trying to set up an Ubuntu (or other popular distro) box as a router, which I think would be much easier to maintain over time. But my concern is that I might overlook some important config that is set by default in OpenWrt, and leave my machine vulnerable to attack. Having a web UI that I can log into and view/make config changes is also kind of nice. Are there any good out-of-the-box solutions or guides for doing this? (I know that OPNSense/PFSense are really popular among homelab users, but unfortunately the Marvell NICs in my mini PC are not supported in FreeBSD).
[1] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt_x86...
c0wb0yc0d3r
> I tried running OpenWrt as a wired router on an x86 mini PC, and found that it had some really powerful features and was certainly rock solid as a router. But there were some major annoyances, too. For example, their documentation includes a script for expanding the root filesystem [1] that left my system unable to boot.
I have been doing this myself recently. The docs around this are pretty out of date. The docs as they’re written only work for the ext4 images if I remember correctly. I got it to work with the squashfs version, but it was really janky. The problem is the OS just writes the to the empty space at the end of the squash partition without changing the partition table. I could only successfully get it working if resized the partition on first boot before the writable overlay is created.
> And while I didn't use it long enough to make it through an upgrade, their documentation on upgrades makes the process sound very brittle (it sounded like configs for installed packages don't carry over by default) and confusing.
I feel similarly about the process. There is either a command or a place on disk where you can put files to protect them across upgrades, but I can’t remember just now. I think it works that way because it’s targeted at embedded devices where I would think you typically bake everything you need into the root file system at compile time. I’m not an embedded engineer so maybe there are better ways of doing it.
the_biot
> I'd rather be running a Debian, with systemd, and boring regular utilities, than the bespoke environment openwrt has crafted together.
Yup, that's the answer. Debian is rock solid, and a script with a bunch of iptables and iproute2 commands is so much simpler than the mess that is OpenWRT's network setup. I only use it for dumb APs, and even then it's questionable -- the UI is nice, but configuring it is unnecessarily complex IMHO.
hagbard_c
I run OpenWRT on a 'big' device, this being a container on a Proxmox-managed DL380 G7. It works fine in this context, performance is good enough to be able to easily saturate the gigabit fibre link without breaking into a sweat.
Installing OpenWRT on such a device comes down to downloading openwrt-${version}-x86-64-rootfs.tar.gz and unpacking it in the target location. Boot the container or VM (or old PC or whatever) and follow the normal OpenWRT configuration procedure. Updating such an installation comes down to making a configuration backup in OpenWRT, unpacking the new distribution and restoring the configuration backup to the new install. Given the low resource requirements for such an installation it makes sense to first clone the working container or VM and performing the upgrade on one of the instances so you always have a working instance at hand.
zokier
Sure, openwrt works. I too have run it on x86 vm at a time. That being said, there is lot that could be improved. My biggest gripe is the weird filesystem layout with overlays and stuff in /tmp and whatnot. I can see it being needed on tiny devices, but on bigger ones can I just have regular ext4/xfs gpt partitions please? Another thing is just replacing the tiny versions of software with regular ones, like busybox->gnu or dropbear->openssh etc. Systemd could be at least considered as init.
All of this kind of things make sense when you consider openwrts origins. But on "big" system I'd just much rather have it be closer to "normal" Linux.
hagbard_c
OpenWRT on x86_64 does not use overlay mounts, here's an overview of a current instance running in a Proxmox-managed container:
/dev/mapper/pve-vm--500--disk--0 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,stripe=512)
none on /dev type tmpfs (rw,relatime,size=492k,mode=755,uid=100000,gid=100000,inode64)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
... more proc mounts...
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
... more sysfs mounts
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev/net type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=65960672k,nr_inodes=16490168,mode=755,inode64)
none on /sys/fs/cgroup type cgroup2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
lxcfs on /proc/cpuinfo type fuse.lxcfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other)
... more lxcfs mounts
udev on /dev/full type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=65960672k,nr_inodes=16490168,mode=755,inode64)
... more udev mounts
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=100005,mode=620,ptmxmode=666,max=1026)
... more devpts mounts
none on /proc/sys/kernel/random/boot_id type tmpfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=492k,mode=755,uid=100000,gid=100000,inode64)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,uid=100000,gid=100000,inode64)
opan
Something with a more normal way of updating the packages and OS would be nice. I thought I'd heard someone was working on an Alpine-based thing a few years ago, but haven't heard anything since.
imiric
Agreed. When I last tried to update packages there was a scary disclaimer about it being likely to break the system, and that flashing a new firmware is preferred.
I nope'd out of that, and don't wish to go through the hassle of flashing again, so my AP is running a year+ old version. It works fine, and I'm not too concerned about it, but I would still like to be able to easily upgrade the system without worrying about breaking it.
opan
To be fair, the flashing they talk about is as simple as uploading the new update file in the LuCI web UI, and there's an option to back up your data, plus I think it tries to preserve it by default anyway. Things only really get messy when you're too many versions behind what you're trying to upgrade to, or in the case of an update failure. You don't typically need to get out a flash programmer or anything. They want you to grab the new OpenWrt a bit like grabbing the new Debian Stable, but they don't want you to do the equivalent of apt upgrading any packages you have installed in between the stable releases (for some reason). It is kinda weird and not ideal but in practice I haven't had that many problems.
zokier
They did replace opkg with apk recently https://forum.openwrt.org/t/major-change-notice-new-package-...
m463
zyxel gs1900-48 - 48-port gigabit switch supported by openwrt (also versions with fewer ports)
xattt
I do find it sad/ironic/interesting to note that the router that started it all is no longer supported.
Not to bell the cat, but some sort of symbolic build for the WRT54G(L) should still be possible… right?
gforce_de
You can build the image yourself, but have to switch off some packages or features - otherwise the image (linux-kernel + tools) is just too large or consumes too much memory. The original router has 8 megabytes RAM-memory and 2 Megabytes flash ("storage"). You can boot a recent kernel 6.16.5, but with 8mb there is not much left to work with 8-)
A starter is here: https://intercity-vpn.de/files/openwrt/wrt54gtest/minimal/
aftbit
I remember swapping the TSOP packages on a WRT54 to double the RAM.
Here's a blog post about this, not sure if it was the same one I followed:
https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2010/09/upgrading-ram-in-w...
mac-attack
My uneducated guess is that that people that want this kind of symbolism aren't willing to actually become a maintainer and invest time in niche code for a declining user base?
xattt
Hence belling the cat
mikepurvis
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.
NoiseBert69
Maybe have a look at Intel n100 boxes (Aliexpress -> Topton). They often have 4-5x 2.5GE Ports with high quality Intel cards. They are very cheap (100-200€) and suck not too much current (5-15W).
You can run OpenWRT on them using the x86 build.
We usually have 5-10x of them around for emergency network tasks if everything burns down in a building.
mikepurvis
Honestly it is tempting. I do have an old Haswell-era industrial motherboard that would manage the task just fine, and I've definitely considered this path.
That said, I'd probably spend about as much on a power supply, case, and NIC for that machine as I would on just buying a Unifi gateway, and theirs comes with an integrated UI for the APs. I'm past the stage of life where I find joy in tinkering with the infrastructure I need to do my job (WFH) so I'll probably still just go off the shelf.
wernerb
I bought a Fujitsu Futron S920 second hand for like 30 euros. Put a dual NIC PCI in there and now have a low watt router running very fast. Can easily run 1Gbit up and down
JimmaDaRustla
I used DD-WRT forever, but holy crap was it buggy. Once I tried OpenWRT, there was no going back. Shit just works, and works well.
petcat
Tomato on the WRT-54G was the all time best in my opinion.
tracker1
Agreed... probably the best experience for a SOHO router+wifi. I currently use OpnSense on an N305 mini pc for my router and the separate wifi AP has it's own management interface. Works for my needs.
bobmcnamara
I tried setting it up as a test router and ran smack into their ancient kernel and iptables not supporting statistics drop mode.
shrx
Interesting, on my latest router (WRT3200ACM) I've had the opposite experience - I had to switch from OpenWRT to DD-WRT since the former was too buggy to use (couldn't get the WiFi to work reliably).
kalleboo
I'm a huge fan of OpenWrt. When I got 10 Gbit internet at home I had to replace my old Ubiquiti USG3 on the cheap so I built a router out of a $80 Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny.
I tried OPNsense and pfSense on advice but they could never crack around 5 Gbps throughput even with a bunch of tweaking, but OpenWrt gave me the full 10 gbps out of the box with no hassles.
I also replaced the Ubiquiti firmware on an EdgeRouter with OpenWrt and it boosted the throughput from around 1.3 Gbps to 1.7 Gbps.
The OpenWrt UI for configuring the firewall is probably one of my favorite firewall UIs of all time. Before OpenWrt I could never wrap my head around those "local" etc ruleset names in more traditional routers, I had to look them up again every time I edited the config. Just being able to say "I have these networks, let this one do this to that one" is very easy to understand.
jauntywundrkind
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.
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.
esseph
A lot of companies were built on this.
shadowgovt
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...
bobmcnamara
I think many companies saw that and poopood GPL firmware.
shadowgovt
They were poopooing that before the OpenWRT case. I don't think there's evidence to suggest that the OpenWRT case made them less willing to use GPL (especially since use of GPL would always have implied they should open-source the firmware derived from it).
aftbit
The first DJI drones (original Phantom at least) used OpenWRT on their "Range Extender" boxes.
haukem
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.
nine_k
It's fun to see that "Amazon choice" portable routers are based on OpenWRT, and run OpenVPN and Wireguard out of the box.
CursedSilicon
Ubiquiti uses a fork of OpenWRT. Starlink's routers run it as well. I'm sure a ton of other vendors are using it
wtallis
The WiFi silicon vendors seem to base their SDK/reference software on OpenWRT (albeit often badly-outdated versions), so almost everyone selling a WiFi box ends up using some variant or fork of OpenWRT. It's been a long time since the days of Linksys trying to cut DRAM costs by using something other than Linux. There are still exceptions like MikroTik where the OS and configuration tools are a main selling point (still Linux-based, but not OpenWRT).
gh02t
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.
esseph
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.
greyw
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...
giulianob
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.
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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
[1] https://openwisp.org/