The OpenWrt Community is proud to announce the Fifth service release of stable OpenWrt/LEDE 17.01 series, which is the first service release after the remerger of the LEDE and OpenWrt projects.
LEDE 17.01.5 “Reboot” incorporates a fair number of fixes back ported from the development branch during the last 8 months.
Some selected highlights of the service release are:
Linux kernel updated to version 4.4.140 (from 4.4.92 in v17.01.4)
Meltdown fixes for x86_64
Security fixes to openssl, mbedtls, wolfssl, samba, dnsmasq, openvpn,
libunwind and the Linux kernel
Introduce latest version of the Wireguard VPN software (0.0.20180519)
Fixes for building with host glibc 2.27 (Used in Ubuntu 18.04)
A full release build for all targets and all userspace packages takes about two days to finish (hint, there's a reason why there is no announcement yet). Given that it's built in parallel on multiple buildbots, the order in which files are uploaded is semi-random.
For most users flashing 18.06.0 will naturally make much more sense (already the rc2 that is being currently compiled).
For most routers the upgrade path to 18.06 is quite straightforward. (There are some exceptions like R7800, where partition structure has been modified due to kernel size growth, but those are rare)
But there are some (old, small) routers in style of 4 MB flash / 32 MB RAM, where 17.01 may be preferable due to size/memory constraints.
@hnyman - I am running 17.01.4 on my R7800 and am looking to either update to 17.01.5 or 18.06.0 once it is released. Can you point me to a instructions unique to the R7800? I am curious about what I need to do to insure a smooth update based on your comment above.
Updating to 17.01.5 is straightforward but naturally does not bring anything really new. 17.01.5 release is rather non-event.
Updating R7800 to 18.06 requires using the TFTP flash that is available from uboot bootloader thanks to Netgear. Kernel has grown and does not fit to the area reserved in 17.01. 18.06.0 rc2 also brings the larger flash area in use.
See r7800 exploration thread for TFTP flash instruction, if you are not familiar with it.
In practice you lose sysupgrade possibility, and need to transfer settings separately. Best would be to recreate settings from scratch (using the old settings as reference). Sysupgrade will work ok again inside the new builds.