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Comment by cesarb | Hacker News Reader

> At the lower end of the price spectrum, OpenWRT supported devices [...] will probably remain supported for decades to come.

Not really. Each newer OpenWRT release needs slightly more storage and memory than the previous one, and these devices at the lower end of the price spectrum tend to have as little storage and memory as they can get away with. Older devices with as little as 4 MB of storage and/or 32 MB of memory are already unable to run current OpenWRT releases, and devices with 8 MB of storage and/or 64 MB of memory are already on the way out. But yeah, other than that OpenWRT does tend to support devices way past their original EOL.

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Counterpoint: The original "Google Wi-Fi" Mesh routers (the hockey puck looking ones) from about 10~ years ago come with *4GB* of storage and 512MB of RAM [1]

[1] https://openwrt.org/toh/google/wifi

They're about $30-$50 USD for a 3 pack on eBay

Why did Google spec them so heavy?

They probably budgeted a dollar for storage and a dollar for ram, or close to it.

Sometimes it's nice to be able to run a normal OS.

The storage is eMMC, basically the cheapest thing available once you've committed. You'd have to actively try to buy eMMC smaller than 2-4GB. Same for the RAM, that's a single chip. It's not a heavy spec, just somewhere near the bottom of the cost curve for those particular parts.

They probably used similar parts in another product and threw them into the routers for the additional order volume, known bring-up risk, and dev benefits. The pixel series also uses Samsung eMMC, iirc.

It's not just those. The 16 MB storage/128 MB flash recommended minimums are a non-issue for pretty much any remotely popular router in the 802.11ac wifi era, and I doubt OpenWRT will suddenly explode in size and blow past those limits any time soon (just look at its trajectory over the past decade).

Oh wow, are those OpenWRT compatible?? I’ve been out of the game since having a WRT54GL with Tomato, so pardon my ignorance

Note that the limit only applies to base OpenWRT installation. I have successfully configured my ancient router to boot from the router's USB storage (64gig flash drive)

I disagree with your sentiment. I think the routers openwrt has dropped support for are super low spec, like $20. And they still run older versions of openwrt.

You could probably also just run openwrt with out a gui and probably do fine.

Additionally, I like that openwrt works on higher end boxes now, like the zyxel gs1900 12, 24 and 48-port switches.

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