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Comment by kozak | Hacker News Reader

I always wanted to try OpenWRT but was put off by the necessity of doing hardware modifications to stock routers to gain root access. So naturally, once I found out that they were releasing some official hardware for OpenWRT (the OpenWRT One router), I ordered it as soon as possible. The router is excellent! It solved my bufferbloat issues and much more.

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You must have had a bad luck/small sample size as majority of consumer routers can be flashed to OpenWRT by selecting the firmware file on the admin page and letting do its thing the exact same way as the original manufacturer update, or by using a TFTP recovery. From the top of my head, I recall only Xiaomi routers needing to be rooted/exploited.

Just get a

  Banana Pi BPI R4 or 
  NanoPi R6S

they have microSD slots and/or NVMe. Or just an x64 device (Intel N100 or N305) with multiple network ports.

I don't think the nanopi r6s has an NVMe slot, but the r6c definitely does

R5s has one :-)

Oh great - I don't need another nanopi and yet I'm now going to check out the spec/price for that one.

NVMe is great for adding swap and frequently updating containers.

Edit: just checked and it's only got 2 or 4gb ram so I'm less interested in it.

R5s has a garbage CPU that won't be able to handle QoS on probably >250mbps.

I'd avoid anything arm based that doesn't have a7x cores (ideally a76/a78 or newer, though I don't think there's any SBC socs using the a710/715/720 yet). A55 cores are old stupidly slow efficiency cores (area efficient, not power efficient).

Over the last few years I had several spare routers laying around. Never had I one that I could flash like you described. All had memory or RAM limitations. Maybe the spare routers I had are just too old.

OpenWrt One is based on Banana Pi anyway. And it comes already assembled, with the Luci GUI working out of the box, etc. In other words, it is a nice package for those who DON'T want to any screwdrivers to be involved just to get it actually running in your home.

Amazing you'd suggest an R4 given it's support is fundamentally broken.

Sinovoip's OEM build is an ancient 21.02 one. Whereas in the official one wifi is completely broken, working SFP is pure luck as "many" modules (all four fiber ones I've got here) on kernel 6.6 either don't show at all or just fail to come up. This was known to OpenWrt's mediatek maintainer who preferred to "spot and fix" it on the go:

https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/6257ea018a7d5b8d4b...

Meanwhile there are about two kernel devs working on mediatek in their free time who've only begun upstreaming R4 support, eg. Frank W.'s DTS parts… for kernel 6.14. (The other dev is Eric. W.)

To quote Frank W.: "The patches i posted are mainly patches adding basic support,only slightly changed to get accepted for mainline. There is no network part yet,also no sfp. Maybe i add sfps in next round,but without full network part (which is much work) it will not work." ( https://forum.banana-pi.org/t/bpi-r4-and-sfp/16945/330 )

Edit: The R4 also needs a soldering mod for certain SFP modules, and prior board revs have resistors that break SFP if NVMe is present (I'd say: sure to get 1.1, but Sinovoip originally shipped that rev broken as well, and didn't increment to 1.2 for the fixed ones).

Didn't know that. Thanks for posting this and taking the time.

> I always wanted to try OpenWRT but was put off by the necessity of doing hardware modifications to stock routers to gain root access.

This is almost never required. They have a long list of supported devices, so unless you're trying to put OpenWRT on a device you already have that requires hardware mods, you should be able to easily find a compatible device that doesn't require this step.

just go to the wiki and get the most expensive and recent device marked as fully supported.

then install is as easy as flashing a file via the stock ui.

i dont get people going with the free alternative (wich is great for a lot of people on a budget) and then crying its harder then the thousand dollars alternative.

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