After a year of development, a new significant release of the OpenWrt 22.03.0 distribution has been published, targeting applications in various network devices such as routers, switches, and access points. OpenWrt supports many different platforms and architectures and has a build system that allows you to easily and conveniently cross-compile, including various components in the assembly, which makes it easy to create a ready-made firmware or disk image adapted to specific tasks with the desired set of pre-installed packages. Builds are generated for 35 target platforms.
Of the changes in OpenWrt 22.03.0, it is noted:
- By default, a new firewall management application is enabled - fw4 (Firewall4), based on the nftables packet filter. The syntax of the configuration files for the firewall (/etc/config/firewall) and the uci interface have not changed - fw4 can act as a transparent replacement for the previously used iptables-based fw3 toolkit. The exception is manually added rules (/etc/firewall.user), which will need to be rewritten for nftables (fw4 allows you to add your own rule blocks, but in nftables format).
The old iptables-based toolkit has been removed from the default images, but can be brought back using the opkg package manager or the Image Builder toolkit. The iptables-nft, arptables-nft, ebtables-nft, and xtables-nft wrappers are also provided, allowing you to create rules for nftables using the old iptables syntax.
- Added support for over 180 new devices, including 15 devices based on the MediaTek MT7915 chip supporting Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax). The total number of supported devices has reached 1580.
- The transfer of target platforms to the use of the DSA (Distributed Switch Architecture) kernel subsystem, which provides tools for configuring and managing cascades of interconnected Ethernet switches, using mechanisms for configuring conventional network interfaces (iproute2, ifconfig), has continued. DSA can be used to configure ports and VLANs instead of the previously offered swconfig tool, but not all switch drivers support DSA yet. In the proposed release, DSA is enabled for the bcm53xx platforms (translated drivers for all boards), lantiq (xrx200 and vr9 based SoCs), and sunxi (Bananapi Lamobo R1 boards). Previously, ath79 (TP-Link TL-WR941ND), bcm4908, gemini, kirkwood, mediatek, mvebu, octeon, ramips (mt7621) and realtek platforms were transferred to DSA.
- The LuCI web interface has a dark mode. By default, the mode is automatically enabled depending on the browser settings, but it can also be forced to be enabled through the "System" -> "System" -> "Language and Style" menu.
- Resolved year 2038 issue caused by 32-bit time_t type overflow (32-bit epochal time counter will overflow on January 19, 2038). In the new release, the musl 1.2.x branch is used as a standard library, in which, on 32-bit architectures, the old 32-bit time counters are replaced by 64-bit ones (the time_t type is replaced by time64_t). On 64-bit systems, the time64_t type is used initially (the counter will overflow in 292 billion years). The move to the new type has changed the ABI, which will require a rebuild of all 32-bit programs associated with musl libc (no rebuild is required for 64-bit programs).
- Updated package versions, including the kernel Linux 5.10.138 with a port of the cfg80211/mac80211 wireless stack from kernel 5.15.58 (earlier kernel 5.4 was offered with a wireless stack from the 5.10 branch), musl libc 1.2.3, glibc 2.34, gcc 11.2.0, binutils 2.37, hostapd 2.10, dnsmasq 2.86, dropbear 2022.82, busybox 1.35.0.
- Builds have been discontinued for the arc770 platform (Synopsys DesignWare ARC 770D).
Source: opennet.ru
