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Comment by smashed | Hacker News Reader

Hmm maybe not but reading all the linked forum posts and threads, people are at a complete lost for information.

"I installed version X.Y.Z and so far so good"

"I tried all available updates and it keeps crashing".

There is no transparency in the published updates. Take that firmware blob (which is probably 99% GPL licensed by the way) and shut up. That's basically what the vendors are saying.

What's ironic is that most OEM are using some sort of out of date openwrt derivatives as a base for their closed source firmwares, which are obvious GPL violations.

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> What's ironic is that most OEM are using some sort of out of date openwrt derivatives as a base for their closed source firmwares, which are obvious GPL violations.

Do you have a source of that or am I out of date? Based on my knowledge, outdated, GPL-violation OpenWRT would still be a massive upgrade over what's usually developed in-house by OEMs.

Linksys WRT 1200/1900/3200/32X touted their OpenWRT based firmware as a feature (though those routers are about a decade old now, and their Wi-Fi chips have unfixed bugs due to Marvell selling their Wi-Fi division to NXP)

Musk's "Starlink" router is also OpenWRT based

I use a WRT1200AC running openWRT as my router, wifi disabled, and it works pretty well. I use two WRT1900AC running openWRT to make a WDS bridge and can get about 400-500Mbps of iperf3 throughput, and one of the two serves as an access point. Even though the wifi does indeed have its limitations in the form of missing features, it's been reliable and performant for me.

It's not missing features, it has bugs that'll never be fixed in the firmware

https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt_ac_series#marvell_wifi

Right, but they're mostly bugs in optional features like 802.11w and DFS. In my mind, there isn't really much of a practical distinction between a missing feature and a feature that doesn't work. The interoperability bugs are perhaps the most nefarious, but don't really impact most people. For my home wifi setup, they've been pretty decent. Their range and throughput are good. I've reliably streamed games over wifi with them. Their CPUs are also relatively powerful, making them good routers. They can be had on eBay for $30-$40.

Buying $30-$40 access points on eBay is a bit of a hobby of mine. I've been using a Netgear R8000 as an access point for a few months. There's no OpenWRT support, but it's supported by FreshTomato. Qualitatively, it seems to work well in terms of latency and throughput when the signal is strong. It seems to perform worse than the WRT1200AC that I was previously using at that location, when at the fringe. When I'm at the center of my house, my phone tends to associate with it but then struggle to get packets through. Maybe I just need to dial down the AP's TX power, though.

Many home routers/wifi access point/mesh wifi systems are qualcomm/atheros based.

These system are almost always built on the official SDK provided by Qualcomm, known as QSDK.

QSDK is a fork of an old OpenWRT version (chaos calmer, 2018). Unlike the open source version, it includes proprietary drivers and many changes. Openwrt devs refer to it as a "frankenfirmware".

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