Hello there. I understand OpenWRT when installed on a typical broadcom device such as a Netgear R7000 or an Asus Rt-AC68U will have very poor if not entirely not functional wifi. But what about using one of these devices as a purely wired router and ignore the wifi bits. Will OpenWRT work satisfactorily in this case or are the other broadcom bits and pieces also poorly supported in OpenWRT? And what about hardware or software offloading, which broadcom calls cut through forwarding, is this supported in OpenWRT? The reason I ask is that I just picked up a R7000 for $25 and am thinking of trying OpenWRT on it. I currently have an AC68U on Fresh Tomato as my main router with the wifi disabled, and a few more 68u' as stupid access points. Being as how I dont need WiFi on my main router I thought it might be fun to try OpenWRT. Fresh Tomato is great compared to stock firmware but its running the 2.6 kernel thats got to be a decade old by now. I know OpenWRT runs much more modern kernel.
If the devices are supported by OpenWrt, wired functionality should be available (check the individual device pages for details).
Broadcom tends to use proprietary offloading (crt.ko), which is not available to OpenWrt, so expect the routing throughput to be below that of the OEM firmware. You'll need to test it to confirm the exactly delta.
Just in general, 25 USD should have given you better- and much better-supported devices on the used market.
I know I know :(. Installing OpenWRT was an afterthought. I originally got it for Fresh Tomato as it works quite beautifully there. I do have a few OpenWRT purpose purchased devices around here as well however nothing is powerful enough to be the master router.
Thanks for the insight.