After a year of development, a significant new release of the OpenWrt 22.03.0 distribution has been published, aimed at use in various networking devices such as routers, switches, and access points. OpenWrt supports a wide range of platforms and architectures and features a build system that allows for easy and convenient cross-compilation, including various components in the build, enabling the straightforward creation of a firmware or disk image tailored to specific tasks with a desired set of pre-installed packages. Builds have been created for 35 target platforms. <\/p>\n
Notable changes in OpenWrt 22.03.0 include: <\/p>\n
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By default, a new application for managing the firewall is enabled \u2014 fw4 (Firewall4), based on the nftables packet filtering framework. The syntax of the configuration files for the firewall (\/etc\/config\/firewall) and the uci interface have not changed \u2014 fw4 can serve as a transparent replacement for the previously used fw3 toolkit based on iptables. The exception is the 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).\n
The old iptables-based tooling is removed from the default offered images but can be restored using the opkg package manager or the Image Builder tools. Additionally, iptables-nft, arptables-nft, ebtables-nft, and xtables-nft wrappers are provided, allowing the creation of nftables rules using the old iptables syntax. <\/p>\n
Support for over 180 new devices has been added, including 15 devices based on the MediaTek MT7915 chip with Wi-Fi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) support. The total number of supported devices has reached 1580.\n
The translation of target platforms has been continued to utilize the DSA (Distributed Switch Architecture) core subsystem, which provides tools for configuring and managing cascaded Ethernet switches, using mechanisms for configuring standard network interfaces (iproute2, ifconfig). DSA can be used for configuring ports and VLANs instead of the previously offered swconfig tool, but not all switch drivers currently support DSA. In this release, DSA has been implemented for bcm53xx platforms (drivers for all boards have been ported), lantiq (SoC based on xrx200 and vr9), and sunxi (Bananapi Lamobo R1 boards). Previously, DSA had been ported for ath79 (TP-Link TL-WR941ND), bcm4908, gemini, kirkwood, mediatek, mvebu, octeon, ramips (mt7621), and realtek platforms.\n
The LuCI web interface has a dark mode feature. By default, the mode automatically activates based on the browser settings, but it can also be forced on via the menu 'System' -> 'System' -> 'Language and Style'.\n
The year 2038 problem caused by the overflow of the 32-bit time_t type has been resolved (the 32-bit epoch time counter will overflow on January 19, 2038). In the new release, musl 1.2.x branch is used as the standard library, in which the old 32-bit time counters have been replaced with 64-bit ones on 32-bit architectures (time_t has been replaced with time64_t). On 64-bit systems, the time64_t type is used from the start (the counter will overflow in about 292 billion years). The transition to the new type has led to ABI changes, requiring all 32-bit applications linked with musl libc to be recompiled (no recompilation is required for 64-bit applications).\n
Versions of packages have been updated, including Linux kernel 5.10.138 with the porting of the wireless stack cfg80211\/mac80211 from kernel 5.15.58 (previously kernel 5.4 with the wireless stack from branch 5.10 was offered), 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.\n
Builds for the arc770 platform (Synopsys DesignWare ARC 770D) have been discontinued. <\/ul>\n