After a year of development, a new major release of the OpenWrt 23.05.0 distribution has been introduced, aimed at use in various network devices such as routers, switches and access points. OpenWrt supports many different platforms and architectures and has an assembly system that allows for simple and convenient cross-compilation, including various components in the assembly, which makes it easy to create ready-made firmware or a disk image with the desired set of pre-installed packages adapted for specific tasks. Assemblies are generated for 36 target platforms.
Of the changes in OpenWrt 23.05.0, it is noted:
- By default, a transition has been made from the wolfssl cryptographic library to the mbedtls library (former PolarSSL project), developed with the participation of ARM. Compared to wolfssl, the mbedtls library takes up less storage space, ensures ABI stability and a long update generation cycle. Among the shortcomings, the lack of support for TLS 1.3 in the LTS branch of mbedtls 2.28 stands out. If the need arises, users can switch to using wolfssl or openssl.
- Support for more than 200 new devices has been added, including devices based on the Qualcomm IPQ807x chip with support for 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 the use of the DSA (Distributed Switch Architecture) kernel subsystem continues, providing tools for configuring and managing cascades of interconnected Ethernet switches, using mechanisms for configuring conventional network interfaces (iproute2, ifconfig). DSA can be used to configure ports and VLANs in place of the previously offered swconfig tool, but not all switch drivers support DSA yet. In the new release, DSA is enabled for the ipq40xx platform.
- Added support for devices with 2.5G Ethernet:
- 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)
- Added support for devices with Wifi 6E (6GHz):
- Acer Predator W6 (MT7986A)
- ZyXEL EX5700 (MT7986)
- AVM FRITZ!Box 7530 routers support VDSL.
- For devices on the ramips MT7621 platform, support for 2 Gbps WAN/LAN NAT Routing has been added.
- DSL statistics sent via ubus or LuCI interface have been expanded.
- Added Arm SystemReady (EFI) compatible target platform.
- The package management infrastructure now supports Rust application packages. For example, the repository includes packages bottom, maturin, aardvark-dns and ripgrep, written in Rust.
- Updated package versions, including Linux kernel 5.15.134 with porting of the cfg80211/mac80211 wireless stack from kernel 6.1 (previously the 5.10 kernel was offered with the wireless stack from the 5.15 branch), 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