The LEDE Community is proud to announce the first release candidate of
the upcoming LEDE 17.01 stable version series. It incorporates thousands
of commits made during the course of the last months and allows us to
refine the code base for the final v17.01.0 version.
With this release, the LEDE development team closes out an intense
effort to modernize many parts of OpenWrt and incorporate many new
modules, packages, and technologies.
Some selected highlights since the OpenWrt Chaos Calmer release are:
Linux kernel updated to version 4.4.42 (from 3.18 in Chaos Calmer)
Update of essential software:
dnsmasq updated to 2.76 (from 2.73 in Chaos Calmer)
busybox updated to 1.25.1 (from 1.23.2 in Chaos Calmer)
mbedtls version 2.4.0 (updated from polarssl 1.3.14 in Chaos
Calmer)
openssl updated to 1.0.2k
Improved Security Features
Use SHA256 instead of MD5 to validate source code for upstream
packages
mbedtls: disable SSLv3 support
OpenSSL: disable support for compression, heartbeats, NPN,
Whirlpool, and J-PAKE
Smart Queue Management (SQM) minimizes bufferbloat by using the
cake and fq_codel qdisc's. //[[:docs:howto:sqm|More...]]//
Improvements to the WiFi stack eliminating bufferbloat on ath9k,
mt76 and some ath10k chipsets
Airtime fairness scheduler for ath9k to prevent slow stations
from hogging too much airtime
Various stability and regression fixes to the Linux wireless
stack and ath9k in particular
Provide alternative Candela-Tech ath10k-ct driver
Updated toolchain
musl 1.1.15
gcc 5.4.0
binutils 2.25.1
Platform and Driver Support
Lantiq
Added redistributable DSL firmware
Updated DSL phy drivers
Added new targets:tickets
apm821xx (AppliedMicro APM821xx)
arc770 (Synopsys DesignWare ARC 770D)
archs38 (Synopsys DesignWare ARC HS38)
armvirt (QEMU ARM Virtual Machine)
ipq806x (Qualcomm Atheros IPQ806X)
layerscape (NXP Layerscape)
zynq (Xilinx Zynq 7000 SoCs)
Reorganized x86 target:
Drop dedicated Xen DomU target, merged with x86/generic
Enable AES-NI support
Removed targets:
realview, replaced by armvirt
ppc44x, disabled due to code brokeness
netlogic, dropped due to no available hardware
Build system improvements
Separation of base system and community feeds to simplify
distribution of binary package updates
Fixes and enhancements in package dependency handling, better
support for virtual provides
Per-device rootfs images to better tune package selection to each
individual device profile
New image build code improving compilation times and simplifying
device profile declarations
New package/.../check make target to run a series of standard
diagnostics on Makefiles
Support for fetching sources using Curl
Generate reproducible source tarballs when packing SCM checkouts
Image Builder / SDK
Rework library bundling to allow for better portability between
different Linux distributions
Add support for building kernel modules using the SDK
Added support for a many new routers and boards
Known issues:
Available space on devices with only 4MB flash is very low,
users requiring extra packages might want to consider using the
image builder to repack custom images
The available memory on devices with 16MB RAM might be too low to
reliably run opkg or sysupgrade operations, especially in
conjunction with LuCI
The source snapshot tarballs produced by Github do not correctly
compile all packages due to missing Git history information, this
will be fixed with the next RC
The SDK tarballs embed a wrong revision and might report "r0+3043"
instead of "r3042", this is a cosmetic issue which will get fixed
with the next RC
Running RC1 for several days now on an Archer C7 v2 and everything has been absolutely flawless thus far. Both Wifi working great from the beginning, Luci on by default, etc. Great experience, in my opinion.
Jo, would you guys consider taking the Linksys WRT3200ACM off the list for 17.01.0 release? The biggest issues (I've tried the pure rc1 build) are: flaky/non-working WiFi, undefined LEDs, LEDs that when enabled kill WiFi. It's just not up to a level of what you'd call a "release".
I like WDS. I have a TPlink running 80MHz channel width connected to an old Buffalo with 20MHz width. Works nicely. I read everywhere that both routers need to run same software and be same brand, but this franken-WDS is good.