Why doesn't OpenWrt officially support Android TV Boxes?

For Developers
1

There are people out there building openwrt for tv boxes like @ophub the builds are running perfectly fine for most tv boxes but I can't find these boxes in the openwrt table of hardware. Can someone tell me why these boxes aren't officially supported by the openwrt team ? I'm just curious

2
  • because no one has actually submitted a pull request/ patchset, yet
  • because the code may be too horrible
    • e.g. ancient vendor kernel
    • plenty of proprietary drivers (graphics, vpu, ...)
    • not supported mainline (someone will have to do it, either the vendor or a community party)
  • because OpenWrt doesn't have anything of a GUI
  • because these devices are generally unsuitable for routing, fast SOC, but horrible I/O (single 100BASE-T ethernet, crap wireless)
3

I agree with some of that. But there are workarounds

  1. I use USB 3.0 to ethernet adapter so that I can get more than just 100Mbps ethernet. Some tv boxes already have gigabit ethernet port so this solution is not needed for every tv box and only if you want more than 100Mbps of transfer speed
  2. True about crap wireless, that's why I use another router as an access point.

Can't comment about the codes since I'm not a programmer.

4

That's assuming that the TV box has USB 3.0. If it has USB 2.0, you'll only be a bit better than 100Mbps speeds (even though the link itself will negotiate at 1G, you can only get 200Mbps of real-world network bandwidth through a USB 2.0 connection).

But the other points from @slh are pretty key... OpenWrt is primarily designed as a router and networking OS, so SoCs that have poor routing performance are typically not high on the development priority list (with the exception of those used in some network switches). There would be a ton of work to do to bring support, and I'm not sure that there would be a sufficient return on the development investment (performance; but also users actually installing OpenWrt on said devices and then doing something (?) interesting with it given the likely performance limitations).

5

got your point thanks

6

Also, the ophub images do not use the openwrt kernel. They use the openwrt userland with a custom kernel supporting the amlogic SOC