The router I see being recommended for openWRT lately is the Belkin RT3200 (also called Linksys E8450, they're the same device) because it's a cheap router you can get at Walmart and has 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) support out of the box with openWRT.

I have one of these running openwrt and I'm quite happy with it

I have a few of these: WIFI6, 128MB Flash, 64-bit ARM A53, DSA, hardware NAT offloading, solid build quality and the price is right. If you look at the OpenWRT TOH you’ll see hundreds of models but historically some of them get more love than others. I think this model will be popular in the OpenWRT world in the same way as the TP-Link Archer C7, Netgear WNDR3700 and Linksys WRT54G models. At least I hope so.

I used to bring OpenWRT routers everywhere I go. But if you worry about performance I'd actually recommend you get a router that's supported by AsusWRT Merlin. I've had a lot of WIFI performance and range issues with cheaper routers on OpenWRT.

I recommend looking at the supported devices list, since some models have Chinese v2 models that are indistinguishable, but unsupported.

https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/

https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng/wiki/Supported-De...

Broadcom's driver model is annoying. Definitely why Merlin shines here.

I have been a casual Linux user from back when I did installs from Ubuntu ISO CDs in the mail. Broadcom is in everything and has always a huge pain to work with, it remains a huge pain to this day.

I second Merlin's recommandation, it's just the right amount of stock+custom features I want for my day to day. Rock solid for stability.

Does asus merlin support wireguard yet?

Has done since 3rd Dec for the 388 branch

https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/changelog

Unfortunately the 388 branch is for AX models only.

> indistinguishable, but unsupported

Ah, hardware vendors. Never change.

>> indistinguishable, but unsupported

> Ah, hardware vendors. Never change.

Hardware vendors, please never change; it makes our lives harder when you do;)

The best part is that it makes third party firmware much harder, but at the same time their own firmware is proprietary abandonware in very short order.

I do not recommend any of Asus routers because the hardware is unstable/buggy. The most recent purchase RT-AX58X was rebooting every 20-50 minutes, and there were no ways to fix it. Unless you want to buy multiple, test and return the buggy ones.

What I did was to look for good value second hand routers nearby to me on Kijiji (Canadian classified market similar to Craigslist) then narrow them down by OpenWrt support.

Using this method, I bought 3 wireless routers 2.5-3 years ago for a total of about 50 CAD. They have been running as dumb wireless APs (https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dumbap) ever since, to great effect.

This will largely depend on how much (read: bandwidth) you want to route. I used to be a big fan of the PCEngines ALIX boxes (https://openwrt.org/toh/pcengines/apu) because you could run pretty much anything on them, but with big gigabit connections nowadays, they're less well suited.

If you're looking to route the lower end of things, you're likely to be fine with an SBC like the above. If you're looking for more, then something with Hardware offload is worth looking out for. With OpenWRT, you're likely to be looking at either a fairly meaty X86 for gigabit, or an off-the-shelf for which it supports HW offload.

Apu2 can route gigabit just fine (on Linux with non-PPPoE). No idea about OpenWRT specifically but assume it works.

Ahh that may be consensus bias on my behalf - in the UK we're largely on PPPoE sadly.

Thing is that most users want some form of qos/aqm to guard against load induced delay, which the apu and similar low power devices cannot handle above a few hundred mbps

That's interesting, because you've identified the reason I asked the question - on my TP-Link router wired connections just flood out wireless connections, and make them unusable as long as I'm doing anything heavy (like downloading ISOs).

The solution's not going to be found in the firmware, is it?

Yes, in general, having a better router would probably help (although you haven't mentioned the exact model you have, maybe it's already fine and the problem is elsewhere).

Enabling SQM [1] would probably mitigate the issue further, at the cost of requiring more processing power.

[1] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/...

I didn't want to bog HN down in doing my tech support for me, but since you ask it's a TP-Link AC1200 (https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/wifi-router/arche...). I'm not doing anything meaty with it most of the time.

I found this to be completely unnecessary when I moved to a 100Mbit symmetrical connection. Not sure if its the higher speed or having a better upload channel, but I completely got rid of all QoS/traffic shaping on my router and never felt the need to turn it back on.

The need for aqm is dependent on the status quo. Most providers nowadays use red/pie in the last mile and buffers-inducted delay rarely exceeds 100ms; much less so when it became clear that flow-queueing would be required and possible. Also multiple queues with codel on them have found their way into some wifi stack’s to deblot this access layer

This is what I run, with a slimmed down version of Debian. Thing is a fucking champ.

I have a Celeron J4125-based fanless mini PC which I run OpenWrt on. It has been fantastic for me and can route my 1000/25 connection at 100% without breaking a sweat.

It's a Qotom Q750G5. Similar models can be purchased from Protectli if you do not want IME or if you want coreboot.

Anyway, it is a fantastic little device which sips power and I'm very happy with it.

Edit: one last note -- I use this for routing only. I did not add the wlan module since I have dedicated access points installed in some of my closets.

More specific in my case: are there any APs that would be good replacements for Unifi AP AC models or above? Looking to replace my unifi setup with something simpler (don’t need to provision APs centrally as I just have one, but want the rock solid reliability and speed).

Omada

OpenWRT runs on some Ubiquiti hardware, check their compatibility list

GL.inet has openwrt from factory with a nice ui. I tried one of their cheap ones.

GL.inet are not using openwrt from factory. You can see in many forum threads. It's a custom one, sometimes derived from vendor SDK, like qsdk. I have one very nice small router from them, which can run mainline openwrt, but this is not always the case

I ran into this after considering upgrading my hardware (WRT3200ACM and friends can't upgrade past 22.0.2 due to a "broken mv88e6176 switch." https://openwrt.org/releases/22.03/notes-22.03.3#mvebubroken...

But the Flint model (802.11ax) is using Qualcomm's hacked up OpenWRT: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/gl-inet-gl-ax1800-flint-users-di... Sounds like it'll be a while.

I buy GL.iNet routers, they've been incredibly reliable.

They come with OpenWrt on them, plus the vendor's web interface. You can flash regular OpenWrt which is the first thing I do.

Make sure any model you look at is supported on the ToH. It takes a while for brand new models to appear in stable owrt releases.

Sadly, GL.iNet Wi-fi 6 routers seem to have no official openwrt support. None of their devices are listed here: https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi

There seems to be some experimental openwrt build for GL.iNet Flint (GL-AX1800), but it still has some issues with fans: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/gl-inet-ax1800-new-router-openwr...

Another vote for GL.inet devices here, I've got a couple of Mango's and a couple of Creta's. Both low end devices, but their wifi coverage is great for the price and size of device, and they're working well for me as Wifi-VPN gateways, although I don't push a lot of bandwidth through them.

The more you pay the more bandwidth they can handle, depends on how / where / why of the implementation.

GL.inet devices are convenient and user friendly, but they run (by default at least) an outdated fork of OpenWRT and have issues with overheating.

Note also to actually research the GL.iNet router model before purchasing - they falsely label some routers as "official openwrt". For example, the GL-SF1200 is listed as an OpenWRT router by them but some of the binaries on it, run on an outdated Linux kernel, and have not been fully made available to the public by the manufacturers of the Chinese SoC used on it. Thus, it is unlikely to run any OpenWRT fork or even receive opensource updates - https://forum.openwrt.org/t/how-do-gl-inet-devices-become-su...

I think the Nanopi R5C Mini seems like a good choice for OpenWRT (Dual 2.5Gbps, Rockchip RK3568B2) https://a.co/d/0sHWZhf

I don't recommend buying a "router".

I recommend buying a miniPC that has at least 2 network ports and install OpenWRT on there. You can do it on ARM-based PCs or even x86_64 based PCs.

Then connect this miniPC to a cheap 8-port switch, and get some WiFi APs and connect those also to the switch.

This way you will get a much more powerful and reliable "router" that can't ever "brick". Better WiFi quality with good Prosumer / small business APs, and the ability to upgrade your WiFi independently of your router as needed.

Something like this for example:

https://liliputing.com/linkstar-h68k-is-a-pocket-sized-route...

I want to recommend this route so much.

Alas good wifi cards are extremely hard to procure and to fit to boxes. You can maybe get someone to sell you a $200+ AP-class wifi6 board.

Then you need some way to actually put it in a computer. Many are oversized mPCIe. We are starting to see some m.2 but it's rare & again they're likely to be oversized. Some have crazy power requirements, like having teo lugs to provide 5V on.

This is by far the worst served aspect of personal computing & it's such a shame. I with the adding card market existed. And many how great it would be if USB chipsets could be reliable AP. Maybe they have gotten better, but after years of religiously buying everything Alfa made & trying to see how good an AP it'd be before falling over, it feels like a relatively simple ask that would make the world of difference (lots of modest sized APs everywhere) is so unlikely to happen. For no good reason that I can tell.

actually procuring cards not hard. i bought a bunch of times in the past compex cards with atheros chipsets from https://www.shop.compex.com.sg/products and it's alter ego https://www.524wifi.com/ . But I eventually gave up on going this route due to reasons that you described. Also it was turned out to be much more expensive to DIY compared to buying wifi ap and flashing it with openwrt.

So now I run as router/everything x86 with a bunch of 10g/sfp ports and a couple of r7800 flashed with openwrt as purely AP

Compex's march upwards in price has been absurd. The 3x3 wifi-5 cards were like $75 originally. I don't know how much Qualcomm is to blame here but all one can get a 4x4 cards now and they're almost all well over $200. With absurd constraints that make them hard to use in a normal system (weird shape, weird power needs).

It's also just so so striking to me that it's been most of a decade with Compex as the only company making add-on cards. There are some clones (Wallystech), but there's just like no market here. Qualcomm clearly Does Not Give A Fuck about selling chips to anyone else. No one else cares about add-on cards. The whole access-point market perpetuates on the vastest wave of apathy & disregard.

Don't forget that they don't really make those cards for "us". Their target market iirc is industrial systems/whatever. Probably if you buy a lot of 1000 cards price point is different than in online shop.

> With absurd constraints that make them hard to use in a normal system (weird shape, weird power needs).

hahaha. i had one AP built with pcie > minipcie attached to custom bracket to hold extra large card. and 5v stolen from sata port.

when it came time to rebuild it, i just gave up and went the route i described above.

For WiFi you'd buy an off-the-shelf AP, trying to use a desktop computer as an access point is usually a bad idea

Spoken with great confidence & no evidence.

Let's at least probe a little bit here. Is this a "fact" because of good inherent reasons? Or is this a "fact" because of circumstance?

In general, show your thinking. Why do you feel this way? Let's have something to discuss, to see where we might meet or where we can reasonably disagree.

Well to add wireless to a miniPC router, I was meaning to buy APs like these:

https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-wireless

You just put them in a good location and run a wire to your switch.

Or you can get APs that support a mesh configuration and set them up wherever with 1 connected to your switch.

That would fly against the assumption of most people that the router also is the 'modem' for one, and that the necessary 'modem' for whichever access-technology is often mandated by the ISP, for another.

Which you rarely can escape outside of business-contracts, regardless of concepts like 'router-freedom'.

In very rare circumstances you'll get to know the exact specifics of the low-level technicals before that shit is installed, and can plug in you own stuff without excess gear.

> Something like this for example:

https://liliputing.com/linkstar-h68k-is-a-pocket-sized-route...

> At the heart of the little computer is Rockchip’s quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor with ARM Mali-G52 2EE graphics

How is the linux support for this ?

How does this work with routing? Does each AP get its own IP address, or is there some special protocol for running the APs "transparently" as though the router had its own built-in wireless antennae?

Yes, APs will each get an IP.

But it's typically really simple to set up. You just plug 1 or more APs into your switch and setup their WiFi info like name/password and signal formats and off you go.

Like these: https://store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-wireless

I bought a Netgear WAX202 and been pretty happy with it. At the time I bought it, I found it difficult to find many other 802.11ax models supported by OpenWRT here in Canada. I was also happy that it supported 802.11ax on both 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands, the latter of which is often missing. I'm not sure how valuable it will be, but that is the first major upgrade to the 2.4 GHz band since 802.11n (2009!) and I tend to keep my routers for a long time.

Good Life iNet devices all come with OpenWrt-based firmwares, and generally after some time you can upgrade to vanilla OpenWrt without having to resort to recovery mode or similar shenanigans.

Even if you don't, you can access the traditional OpenWrt web interface (Luci) on the vendor's firmware, alongside their (pretty nice) simplified web interface.

https://www.gl-inet.com/

I like Mikrotik hardware.