Hi all, I was looking at GL.iNet products, and it seems like many of these devices ship with a slightly modified OpenWRT pre-installed. And many of them also support vanilla/stock OpenWRT.
May I know if GL.iNet devices not listed on the OpenWRT "Table of Hardware" page can still run vanilla OpenWRT?
Particularly looking at GL-X300B (not listed) which is very similar to the GL-X750 (which is listed on the OpenWRT "Table of Hardware" page).
Appreciate your thoughts on this
Turns out you are in luck, there's support pending:
The above means that the device will be supported in OpenWrt Snapshot images, it's probably not going in current stable release (21.0x) but will be in the next
Nice! I saw this too. It seems like additional work is required to implement each OpenWRT release in unsupported hardware. I'm not a firmware developer, hence not familiar with the process. May I know what's required if I were to include support for a new device?
And secondly, does that same work have to be re-done by someone for every release? Or does it mean that once the hardware is supported, then each subsequent release will just require a sysupgrade?
Thanks in advance!
Thank you for the clarification. How much lead time should a new device have before it's included in a stable release?
I don't think it will make it into 21.02. Needs to be accepted into master first.
Once a device is supported it usually stays supported, except when the hardware becomes a constraint for more modern Linux/OpenWrt devices, e.g. when the RAM or flash isn't sufficient anymore.
Ath79 is a very popular target, little chance it will be phased out before it becomes completely obsolete.
you look at previous commits that added support for similar devices to see what files must be edited or added, and follow the contribution rules https://openwrt.org/submitting-patches
The latter. Support is only added once.
It works like this: new software and devices are added to master/development branch and every year or so the master branch is split to create a stable release.
Since this device is not going to be merged in time for 21.02 (which was split months ago and has been stabilized), you will have to wait next year(s) when next stable release appears, so 22.0x or whatever.
Until that time, OpenWrt will only provide development snapshot images for your device, which are a bit more annoying to work with.
Thank you both for your responses, very helpful and clarifies things quite nicely.
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