There seems to be a whole bunch of ARM SBCs supported. Including support for Odroids etc. At first glance this is an interesting proposition.
However there are curious links to other websites, and I do not know if this is packaged spyware or not? There also seems to be an indication that the image provided will download a kernel during the installation process. I would ask why is it not in the image itself?
Could some smarter person than myself investigate this, or at least give me a clear opinion. If these "ports" are safe to use should they not be in the download area of OpenWrt here?
I know it will not address your questions directly, but there could be very legitimate reasons why certain things/devices are not in the OpenWrt tree.
They may need to use a kernel newer than OpenWrt kernel.
They may be requiring the kernel which is older than what OpenWrt uses because of the necessary outdated binaries/blobs.
They may need to use proprietary binaries/blobs and/or code which is not licensed under the license which is accepted by OpenWrt.
If you don't mind doing some legwork yourself, I'd raise an issue in that repository and ask contributors why their code is not in the OpenWrt tree yet (and if they are planning to submit it)?
The short answer would be, because no one bothered to submit the code to OpenWrt.
stangri has given you part of the longer answer why this might not be as easy as one would hope (afaik Amlogic has barely existing mainline support and quite some additional fun with signed bootloaders and similar heavy-handed lock down methods).
I could do that. Given what you have suggested in the rest of your reply, I would have to investigate the contents of the image to see if there are any "binary blobs" that are not necessarily open source. Then what?
If you can, maybe you could help in the determination of whether this is safe to use in the first place. Which was the reason for my first post.
hi, i did some check , ophub repository which contains a derivative of openwrt which is build on top of armbian, even the armbian version they are using is just borrowing the kernel build and modifying the kernel with a new source which hosted at this repo https://github.com/unifreq which claims have cloned the repo from https://github.com/chewitt/linux, the last one looks legit as the they are contributing to main linux kernel. But cannot vouch for unifreq , ideally he should have forked a mainline kernel repo and created a new branch to patch for transparency. So what they are doing is not using openwrt kernel just the application , they build an armvirt from openwrt and copy/merge the rootfs , even the luci app is modified and copied from new repo. So i would recommend to stay away from it, or you can just use armbian and run openwrt as a container in armbain. I am trying to figure out how to use the kernel from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/amlogic/linux.git/refs/tags and patch openwrt if possible or just run as a docker container under armbian
