Currently I own a very cheap chinese Youhua WR1200JS router with OpenWRT on it.
So far I'm quite pleased with OpenWRT running on this router, nut I would like to buy a more powerfull router.
I'm really looking into buying the Turris Omnia 2019, as these hardware specs look really promising to me.
What keeps me from actually buying it at the moment, are some forum posts of users that had a lot of difficulties in the deployment of OpenWRT.
Some of them even bricked their device using the original flashing instructions.
Now I also found out that there appear to be multiple revisions out there.
So my question is:
Is the Turris Omnia 2019 currently properly supported by OpenWRT 19.07 at the moment, and what things do I need to look out for when buying this hardware.
I have to admit that I'm also a bit confused about the Omnia 2019 support.
I have to agree that link no. 3 gives the implication that they're still working on support for the 2019 version of this router.
Maybe I will at least wait for the next stable release which will be branched from the main branch andere check what changes have been incorporated before buying this router.
But indeed the forum post about the installation problems of the Turris Omnia 2019 made me start this forum post.
The opensource nature of this router makes me really interested in this device.
It's really unfortunate that the manufacturer is not contributing any code directly to the OpenWRT community.
The manufacturer's team is contributing to OpenWrt since a while, mostly on apps but also reporting bugs (and if possible trying to supply patches) that been introduced in OpenWrt.
That said however, the hardware support development for Turris and Omnia has taken a back-seat since the manufacturer launched another product platform and the hardware developers being (ever since) busy with that.
A similar (slightly more powerful) product platform [6] perhaps to consider as alternative, though there is no mention of OpenWrt support, or if you want to go all the way [7]
I have both the Omnia and the MOX. The latter is currently unused. The latter also has no OpenWrt support. I would guess the community needs to add support for it. It would be easiest with kernel 5.4 since the Turris people did a lot of upstreaming to kernel.org.
To be fair I haven’t seen a patch for that on the mailinglist yet. I have attempted to do the switch myself, but both my skills as well as developer documentation are lacking so I was not successful.
As long as PR#2693 is not merged, Turris Omnia users (any revision including CZ11NIC23) may try this build, as drop-in replacement of the OpenWrt snapshot. It includes PR#2693, and adds support for SFP cage and LEDs.
Apart from CZ11NIC23 support, PR#2693 should also fix the U-Boot environment issues observed with OpenWrt on older devices. I have verified that 4-LED reset (re-flash router from USB flash drive) and 7-LED reset (rescue shell on serial console) do work on my CZ11NIC13.
I'll try to keep the images up-to-date with master's kernel version, so that users can install all packages from the default OpenWrt snapshot repository.
At first I want to thank you for your great support for this device.
I still do not own this device, as I'm away from home a lot due to the nature of my work and I don't want to leave my wife with a device which feels a bit on the edge development wise.
I will surely keep an eye on the patchset you posted, and as soon as it gets merged and seeps through to the stable releases I want to review this router as an option again.
Or when I have some spare time, maybe i'll buy it to help in testing and development of this device in openwrt as well.
Although I looked at getting into openwrt development as wel, but for me it's quite hard to figure out where to start.
In the past I have been involved in Android development as well (namely CyanogenMod and LineageOs), which in my opinion had a littlebit more clear documentation for starting developers. But that's totally unrelated to this topic although.
Again many thanks for your hard work!