I was surprised to learn that GL.iNet doesn’t really provide long-term support for their products. I’ve been advised to avoid products with Qualcomm chipsets and stick with MediaTek.
Does anyone here know which GL.iNet products use MediaTek chipsets? I recently bought the Beryl and the Flint 2. Once GL.iNet abandons their products, can I expect long-term OpenWRT support if I flash it to the vanilla firmware? I want the most private and secure products for as long as possible before I’m forced to upgrade.
Depends what you mean by "long term".
You should really ask them for the details of support if you are sticking to their firmware.
If you have re-flashed with the fully open source firmware from openwrt.org, then you will get support for as long as the device meets the minimum criteria for whatever is the current stable version.
Who advised that? The AX1800 and AXT1800 seem to work very well on the newly merged snapshot release. In particular the AXT1800 looks a lot more stable/runs cooler/more ethernet ports etc than the equivalent MT3000.
Development was difficult because Qualcomm make open source driver development much harder - but that is mostly done, so expect OpenWrt support of many more Qualcom devices in the future.
So you're telling me not to worry about Qualcomm chipsets as OpenWRT driver development is complete so there is full support? Even the Flint 3 can be flashed to vanilla OpenWRT?
No, if I wasn't clear, I intend to go with vanilla OpenWRT in the near future.
I think 5-10 years would qualify as long-term? What do you think?
Not for every chipset, at least not yet.
The technology in the Flint 3 (wifi 7) is a bit of a compromise and its particular chipset may never be supported, but then maybe it will.
You need to check before purchasing whether the device you are looking at is actually supported or not.
Right now, if you want vanilla Openwrt, don't buy a Flint 3.
Technology is advancing very rapidly these days. In 10 years we might be all on "wifi 10" or somesuch with wifi 7 as an historical footnote.
10 years is hard to achieve, even if the router mechanically survives it will be marginally usable.
Example of 10 years old still supported device
Check the parameters - ok, it is better than 1 $/€ but not the keeper.
(actually it can forward 700Mbps with offloading, if you drop the wifi part it can still be chained to 4G USB stick with power injector)
i'd say 32/256 will exceed 5 years, but then it will degrade to no good.
Just go with GL-MT3000 or GL-MT6000 and flash sysupgrade to official OpenWrt. No one is guaranteeing long term support with a free open source project but MT SoC support is excellent for those two along with mt76 WiFi and you’ll have likely great builds coming out for many years.
If you want a guarantee look at expensive products from Ubiquiti (dream machine with u7 WAPs etc.) or similar, but then you won’t be on FOSS software if that’s important to you (it’s important to me).
I've seen offices with their old unifi wifi 5 waps for over 6-7 years still getting firmware updates. They definitely support stuff long term. Why bother spreading misinformation without providing a better solution?
Updates yes maybe for some models. But buy a new one and the old controller won't be ableto manage it. Same with a new controller, can't manage old devices. So not misinformation.
It's a lot more nuanced than is being discussed here. But I would suggest that it is somewhat off-topic since the OP asked about support horizons for GL-Inet hardware and associated firwmware.
As stated previously in this thread:
for GL-Inet firmware: ask them about their guaranteed and/or predicted support timelines.
for official OpenWrt: there is no "official" guidance on the support term for any given product, but it's not uncommon to see devices >10 years old still supported.
Typically, the most limiting factors are flash storage space and RAM, so it obviously depends on the specifications of the device in question.
For example, I have a 16 year old (~2009) Ubiquiti RouterStation Pro acting as a VPN endpoint with 24.10 installed. With 16MB storage/128MB RAM, it will likely remain supported for at least one or two more major OpenWrt releases.
But, there are external-to-OpenWrt factors like the upstream linux kernel development that might require more storage and/or RAM, so there are no firm guarantees on support times.
Keep in mind that not all of GL-Inet's devices are supported by the official OpenWrt project and that the specifications (on a per-model basis) will often be factors with respect to how long a device can be supported.
One good example is ipq806x like the R7800. That device is discounted and was made over 10 years ago (came out 2013ish) and not only is it still supported they just moved it to DSA.
Something like the MT6000 (and other Filogic 830s like bpi-r3, tuf-4200) are likely to be supported even better since MediaTek has the best open source support right now. Like I said mt76 wifi driver, but also hardware offloading is kernel supported so doesn’t need custom hacks like the ipq line.
Just more backup for my initial response above on those targets should work well for a very long time. Hopefully for wifi7 Filogic 880 gets to that point eventually but hasn’t yet.
Additionally the MT6000 has a lot RAM and storage.
At the risk of this statement aging poorly ("640k should be enough for everyone"): 1 GB RAM and 8 GB eMMC should be enough for a long time. I cannot imagine a home router ever needing more than that for basic functionality.
What is more likely to happen is that at some point few people still have and use the hardware, and bugs creep in as other things are changed. Eventually it won't be practical to run the latest and greatest kernel on said hardware. This has happened with an old Dell Pentium M laptop I have: it can boot the latest kernel, but WiFi doesn't work any more. Nor does resume.
