OpenWRT turns 20; wants to launch their "first upstream supported" design

Re:OpenWRT turns 20; wants to launch their "first upstream s... by orev on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @11:18PM (#38936089)

OpenWRT is remarkable in how many architectures it supports, with both ARM and RISC-V available. This just happens to be one board and it uses ARM, but it could easily be moved to an official RISC-V one when available with enough support to meet their demand.

P.S. you don’t get to start calling things “legacy” just because you would prefer something else. ARM is clearly at a scale right now where that’s the sweet spot for cost/performance/availability right now.

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Re:OpenWRT turns 20; wants to launch their "first upstream s... by anonymousiam on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @11:49PM (#38936322)

It works great on x86 as well.

I run OpenWRT in a few locations. One of them is VM on a x86_64 fanless (SuperMicro) server hypervisor. The other is a VM on a x86_64 fanless CompuLab FitPC hypervisor.

Along with OpenWRT, those systems also run a PiHole VM (https://pi-hole.net/), and other VMs such as FreePBX (https://www.freepbx.org/).

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Re:OpenWRT turns 20; wants to launch their "first upstream s... by snvzz on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @01:21AM (#38936882)

ARM is legacy because it predates the open ISA standard.

I am interested in this, even if it is based on legacy ISA ARM, as I would rather a hacker-friendly router designed for OpenWRT.

This is relative to some consumer device off the shelf which is hostile to OpenWRT, needing trickery to just install. That is what I had in my previous location, and I would prefer this instead.

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Re:OpenWRT turns 20; wants to launch their "first upstream s... by somerandomqaguy on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @03:01AM (#38937514)

Maybe but I think going with middling ARM chip is more the right call then trying to pursue a RISC-V based chip. The OpenWRT folks don't have the needed logistics chain to distribute this at all, and it sounds like they're leaning hard on both MediaTek and the Banana Pi team for this. I don't know of anyone else off the top of my head that would give a bunch of open source devs working on a niche distro that kind of support.

That said, the VisionFive 2 is available. There's some people on the Openwrt forums working on trying to get OpenWRT to work; might not be a bad idea to reach out to them and see how far they've gotten.

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Re:OpenWRT turns 20; wants to launch their "first upstream s... by snvzz on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @04:04AM (#38937962)

I have a VF2. It does have strong CPUs (relative to A53) and 2x GbE, solving half of the problem.

The other half (wireless) could be solved by using the PCIe lanes. To do it well at scale, we'd need a new board designed for the purpose.

The Pi4A guys meant to release such a router device, but seem to have elected to do other devices instead. Shrug.

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Re:OpenWRT turns 20; wants to launch their "first upstream s... by iforgotpassword on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @02:29AM (#38937268)

That's a weird way if putting it. By that logic, a current Gen Intel CPU is also legacy. It might be carrying a lot of legacy cruft, but calling it a legacy architecture seems just wrong.

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Re:OpenWRT turns 20; wants to launch their "first upstream s... by snvzz on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @02:39AM (#38937342)

Let's not mix microarchitectures and ISAs.

It is very possible to make a great modern implementation of a bad ISA full of legacy cruft; Zen4 is a good example of that. Intel get a participation award for trying.

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