In light of the recent update regarding the removal of the rsync option, I was wondering whether the option to provide access over BitTorrent was considered.
For example, Ubuntu have been offering this option for many years now, and I thought it’s a great way to offload the download bandwidth from central project servers and take advantage of the distributed community resources.
Cheers.
I would imagine that the team that handles the infrastructure may have thoughts on the topic, but my immediate reaction is that it's probably not of significant value for the actual OpenWrt images because:
Compare that against the standard Ubuntu image which is ~8000 times larger (5.9GB for Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS Desktop x86 vs ~8MB for a common embedded device default image) and, in the case of Ubuntu, the single install image is common across the vast majority of x86 hardware.
That said, it could be really useful for the development environment for OpenWrt... the SDK is much larger and a much smaller number of target architectures relative to target devices.
Excellent points. I haven’t considered them.
The reason I thought about it was that rsync is being essentially disabled, and rsync doesn’t cater to the customised images, does it?
Since we are discussing it here, what exactly is the bottleneck for the distribution of OpenWRT binaries to end users, if any?
Honestly, I don't know. There are mirrors, but maybe they don't take enough of the load while simultaneously causing load to keep them up to date. The email list thread that you linked talked about mirroring only the stable releases (not snapshot) in an effort to reduce the load.
But really, I'm not in a good position to answer the question since I'm not responsible for any of the infrastructure considerations.
As an enduser, why would you use rsync for your private images?
The online imagebuilder can only fetch from the official locations
The offline imagebuilder is configured for the official repositories, changing that is possible, but not really a documented approach (and needs a local webserver on your end)
Pretty much anything I can think of needs at most 2-5 files (firmware image and maybe some kernel modules to get online), under 20 MB in total.
Keep in mind, the content of the snapshot repositories changes once daily, even the stable release feeds change regularly, so there's little to be gained from a local cache of the public repositories.
If you build from source yourself, you will have to build 'everything' anyways.
"No one" (famous last words) needs to mirror everything (unless they're offering a public mirror) - and de-/selecting what you do want from a torrent is more work than basically any other imaginable method, all for 2-5 files at <20 MB total.
Yes, rsync is a great method and it's sad that it has to be disabled, blame the ai companies, that's why we can't have good things.
rsync isn’t being turned off, it’s being limited to several “tier 1 clients”. You can then rsync from them.
We did torrents in Gargoyle for a while, it doesn’t work. Images are produced so frequently and you don’t end up with enough peers so the brunt of the bandwidth ends up falling on the main host anyway.
For releases it might work… but why would I download multiple GBs of images just to get the one that I want? I’m not that generous honestly.
Maybe I'm overthinking this, but when I read about disabling of rsync, the first thought I had was “ok, they were trying to use rsync because the main server is overloaded with downloads, and rsync is also overloading it”.
Is this thinking wrong and the download server is doing fine with the end user downloads?
I would suggest also looking at the adm and devel ML discussion on this topic, as well as the Infrastructure wiki (https://openwrt.org/infrastructure#openwrt_project_infrastructure), and Mirrors wiki (https://openwrt.org/mirrors#mirrors). This should help you answer most of your questions.
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