After a year of development, a new significant release of the OpenWrt distribution 23.05.0 has been presented, focused on use in various network devices such as routers, switches, and access points. OpenWrt supports many different platforms and architectures and has a build system that makes it easy to cross-compile, including various components in the build, allowing users to easily create a firmware or disk image tailored to specific tasks with the desired set of pre-installed packages. Builds have been created for 36 target platforms.
Notable changes in OpenWrt 23.05.0 include:
- By default, the transition from the cryptographic library wolfssl to the mbedtls library (formerly PolarSSL), developed with the participation of ARM, has been implemented. Compared to wolfssl, mbedtls takes up less storage space, provides ABI stability, and has a long update cycle. A downside is the lack of TLS 1.3 support in the LTS branch of mbedtls 2.28. If necessary, users can switch back to using wolfssl or openssl.
- Support has been added for over 200 new devices, including those based on the Qualcomm IPQ807x chip supporting Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax), devices based on the Mediatek Filogic 830 and 630 SoCs, as well as HiFive RISC-V Unleashed and Unmatched boards. The total number of supported devices has reached 1790.
- The transition of target platforms to using the DSA (Distributed Switch Architecture) kernel subsystem has continued, providing tools for configuring and managing cascades of interconnected Ethernet switches, using mechanisms for configuring standard network interfaces (iproute2, ifconfig). DSA can be used to configure ports and VLANs instead of the previously offered swconfig tool, but not all switch drivers currently support DSA. In this new release, DSA is utilized for the ipq40xx platform.
- Support for devices with 2.5G Ethernet has been added:
- Acer Predator W6 (MT7986A)
- Mercusys MR90X v1 (MT7986BLA)
- Netgear WAX206 (MT7622)
- Netgear WAX220 (MT7986)
- ZyXEL NWA50AX Pro (MT7981)
- Asus (TUF Gaming) AX4200 (MT7986A)
- Netgear WAX218 (IPQ8074)
- Xiaomi AX9000 (IPQ8074)
- Dynalink DL-WRX36 (IPQ8074)
- GL.iNet GL-MT6000 (MT7986A)
- Netgear WAX620 (IPQ8072A)
- ZyXEL EX5700 (MT7986)
- Support for devices with Wifi 6E (6GHz) has been added:
- Acer Predator W6 (MT7986A)
- ZyXEL EX5700 (MT7986)
- VDSL support has been implemented for AVM FRITZ!Box 7530 routers.
- Support for 2 Gbps WAN/LAN NAT routing has been added for devices running the ramips MT7621 platform.
- DSL statistics have been expanded, delivered via ubus or the LuCI interface.
- A target platform compatible with Arm SystemReady (EFI) has been added.
- Package management infrastructure has gained support for applications written in Rust. For example, the repository now includes bottom, maturin, aardvark-dns, and ripgrep packages written in Rust.
- Package versions have been updated, including the Linux kernel 5.15.134 with the wireless stack cfg80211/mac80211 ported from kernel 6.1 (previously offered was kernel 5.10 with the wireless stack from branch 5.15), musl libc 1.2.4, glibc 2.37, gcc 12.3.0, binutils 2.40, hostapd 2023.09, dnsmasq 2.89, dropbear 2022.82, busybox 1.36.1.
Source: opennet.ru
