Netgear R7000 OpenWrt

Jamesbe12 · March 20, 2020, 10:31pm

Hi,

I dont understand why the R7000 is supported by dd wrt, tomato and Express VPN firmware based on open wrt and open wrt does not support R7000 ( wifi not supported) ?
Thanks

tmomas · March 20, 2020, 10:46pm

Some explanation:
https://openwrt.org/unsupported/wifi_2.4ghz_partly
https://openwrt.org/unsupported/wifi_5ghz
https://openwrt.org/meta/infobox/broadcom_wifi

Jamesbe12 · March 21, 2020, 12:32am

Thanks.
The last link explains well.
But I wonder why the expressvpn firmware works very good with the R7000 and they did their firmware from open wrt source...

Jamesbe12 · March 23, 2020, 11:53am

The tomato works with R7000 but not open wrt.
I ve read about the legal thing (dd wrt) but I guess tomato does not have the rights like dd wrt?

eskimos · August 4, 2020, 9:54am

I do not get it, when you look on the list of supported devices Netgear R7000 is there. So there is licence issues or not?

tmomas · August 4, 2020, 4:42pm

Supported by OpenWrt does not automatically mean that all hardware functions are supported.

See https://openwrt.org/meta/infobox/broadcom_wifi for more info.

darksky · August 4, 2020, 5:11pm

I believe it has to do with non-opensource drivers from Broadcom and DD-WRT having some license agreement whereas OW does not. Tomato has an ancient kernel version. You can search on the tomato boards for this question. There is more detail there as I recall but that is it in a nutshell.