Which chipsets are supported by OpenWrt?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

So I've been browsing for networking hardware and IT hardware in general and while "Dumpsterdiving" I've found a Linksys MR9600 for an incredibly cheap price (only 15$!).

That thing has 512MB RAM and 512MB flash storage according to the specs and for that price it is an absolute steal considering it sells for way over 100$ !

Now before taking my shot I looked around for OpenWrt support but found here in the forums that it probably will never be supported because it has a Broadcom Chipset.

My question now is: Which chipsets are usually supported? Why won't Broadcom be supported in the near future? Is there anything we can do about it?

2

Who are we? Like broadcom shareholders? Broadcom does not provide any info on their wifi chipsets, so all "driver" is reverse-engineered interactions with their firmware, and then they even changed licence to make that non-redistributable.

3

Oh great, so the issue is not only are the drivers not open source but they also prevent any reverse engineering?

Are there any other Chipset manufacturers which engage in similar shenanigans?

4

You totally missed the point, because of lacking documentation open broadcom drivers are very low in features.

Check here:
https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi

Or here:
https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/hardware/soc

1 Like