I have 2 x WRT32x and to date I have been unable to run OpenWRT 21, initially there were several issues configuring the switch interfaces/devices. I managed to work around most of the issues, however 2 problems persist that prevent me from upgrading from 19.07:
when multiple WAN ports are configured (using any type of device), ping packets to the internet from the second WAN are lost initially (as if there was a lag in the device handling initial packets)
wifi works, but with lots of issues connecting some IoT devices and printers to wlan1 Marvell 88W8964 802.11bgn, issues when creating a second AP on the same device (for example a guest network), and the wlan2 Marwell 88W8887 802.11bgnac does not work at all (AP cannot start).
I was wondering if these issues are being looked at or if the development team has totally given up supporting Linksys WRT32x for the future.
Any wireless issue that's due to the mwlwifi driver state is a dead end unfortunately. NXP acquired the Marvell wireless IP and ever since Marvell announced it was selling that off, there has been no activity whatsoever on that front.
If I remember correctly, there have been post stating 19.07 works a lot better than 21.02, so staying at 19.07 is probably a good idea, at least for now.
Ha anyone managed yet to get OpenWRT 21 or 22 running without issues on WRT32x?
My house was hit by a lightning strike that jumped on the Ethernet LAN, I have 4 routers for resilience and to repeat the wifi signal (all of them running OpenWRT). The Linksys WRT32x is the only router that survived and did not propagate the surge to the connected devices. The other routers (a mix of Netgear and other Linksys models), not only were fried, but they allowed the surge to propagate to the connected devices that were destroyed too.
For this reason now I want to install this model everywhere.
BTW, I had a Netgear R7800 clustered with the WRT32x, good OpenWRT router, crap electrical design. It was fried and it allowed everything else attached to it to be fried! They are easy to find and support OpenWRT 22, but I am not sure I would want another one now.
Sure. I have been running OpenWrt master, 22.03 snapshots (and earlier 21.02 snapshots) on WRT3200ACM (which is almost identical).
There are no really specific issues, except the stopped-develpoment wifi driver. WPA3 and 802.11r and 802.11w are not supported. Some client devices will have problems, but you will have to test with your own devices.
If you want wifi, WRT32x is a bad choice. Wired side is ok and the CPU is powerful.
22.03 is in practice the half-year old master code from March 2022, plus later fixes especially firewall4 related stuff. Lots of people have ran master all the time, so there is lots of experience from 21.02 or 22.03 equivalent OpenWrt versions.
There was one bug in upstream Linux mac80211 driver that was fixed late last year, and that improved 21.02 and master (and the later branched 22.03) wifi for mvebu routers like WRT32X / WRT3200ACM a lot.
See
That thread offers probably the widest coverage of wifi in your device.
When I tried OpenWRT 21 on WRT32x about 10 months ago, last time, I had issues with the Switch, in that I could not make VLANs work, and also WiFi, I could not change channel or something like that (my memory is fuzzy), so I reverted to OpenWRT 19 that still works great. Only I do not want to continue using OpenWRT 19 because updates are down to a trickle now. In a nutshell I can still source WRT32xs, they are a bit pricey, they now give me confidence in their electrical surge protection capability too (unlike all other routers I had), however I am concerned that they might be good only for another year or so with OpenWRT 19.
Running OpenWrt 22.03 with zero issues on my WRT32X. It's my main router and I consider it to be fantastic. Handles my 500 / 35 Mbits cable modem with SQM cake, adblock, Samba with USB3 storage hits 100 MB/s across my network, DSA, nftables, etc. all good. Had a 30-day uptime on rc6 (200+ day uptime on 21.02 before moving to 22.03, it's perfectly stable), and final 22.03 is running great so far for a day.
Regarding wifi, yes mwlwifi driver is dead so there will be no improvements there. It works well enough for me. IoT devices are known to be problematic for a long time though. I also have U6-Lite ($10 wifi 6 wap) in a more central spot at my home connected to it, I consider wifi 5 routers dead at this point anyway.
Here is the list of packages I add after clean install which may help you:
opkg update && opkg install luci luci-ssl irqbalance luci-app-advanced-reboot luci-app-sqm luci-app-adblock luci-app-upnp luci-app-wireguard luci-app-samba4 kmod-usb3 kmod-ata-marvell-sata kmod-usb-storage kmod-usb-storage-uas block-mount usbutils mount-utils luci-app-hd-idle kmod-fs-exfat iperf3 nano