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Introducing the LEDE project – A reboot of the OpenWrt community

lede-project.org

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Re: Introducing the LEDE project – A reboot of the OpenWrt community

#5
post #3

While I'm excited about OpenWrt, why wouldn't the ecosystem move to Raspberry Pi at this point, considering that a Pi and multiple wireless NICs can be purchased for much less than a typical access point?

Throughput. The single Ethernet port on the Pi only gets somewhere between 30 and 40 megabits. Some smartphones can exceed this on WiFi and higher end Internet connections will definitely exceed this.

That's for a single connection before you even get to NAT/firewalls/IPv6 and VPNs.

Note that I haven't put the Pi3 through its paces yet but the extra CPU and RAM won't completely compensate for the USB/Ethernet limitations.

Re: Introducing the LEDE project – A reboot of the OpenWrt community

#6
post #3

While I'm excited about OpenWrt, why wouldn't the ecosystem move to Raspberry Pi at this point, considering that a Pi and multiple wireless NICs can be purchased for much less than a typical access point?

They are really completely different ecosystems, each with their own use cases, but off the top of my head:

1. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically break out the ethernet interfaces, and require a USB>Ethernet.

2. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically have onboard wifi, this means you will be putting all of your traffic over USB, which as AC rollout happens you don't have enough bandwidth/latency with USB 2.0

3. Raspberry Pi boards (and rpi-similars) don't typically have multiple ethernet interfaces.

A "Standard" OpenWRT router has between 2 and 5 onboard ethernet interfaces, a small power efficient processor, and between 1 and 6 onboard high power Wifi interfaces.

Now, Monowall/pfsense can be a great route to go, but even then you don't use an Rpi because you want your interfaces hanging off of PCIe instead of USB.

Re: Introducing the LEDE project – A reboot of the OpenWrt community

#7
post #3

While I'm excited about OpenWrt, why wouldn't the ecosystem move to Raspberry Pi at this point, considering that a Pi and multiple wireless NICs can be purchased for much less than a typical access point?

OpenWRT is an embedded linux distribution that works similarly to something like the Yocto project.

I don't see how it relates at all to one hardware vendor, with rather terrible track record on all things networking to boot.

Re: Introducing the LEDE project – A reboot of the OpenWrt community

#8
A long time openwrt user here. What puzzles me the most is that, those who are forking openwrt are the the majority group of core developers for openwrt, so I don't know why they are leaving the project they're in control in the first place. It seems a few core developers left behind are also in shock, nobody knows why, and there is no dispute in the community that led to the split either, truly a mystery.

Re: Introducing the LEDE project – A reboot of the OpenWrt community

#9
post #4

It is a real pity that the lack of developers is compensated by splitting developer focus on two different forks. If the reasons stated are true, let's hope it works out and strengthens embedded Linux, maybe even leading to a reunion like egcs/gcc.

This announcement comes as a surprise to all the other developers, myself included.

- mbm (openwrt founder)

Re: Introducing the LEDE project – A reboot of the OpenWrt community

#10
They have a point, maintaining something based on OpenWRT is extremely painful if you are not very in tune with the development.

I remember one instance where they just switched the entire package feed stuff around and didn't bother porting all old packages over. Or when core packages move around willy-nilly.

Another instance was when they changed over to a new freaking libc (musl). That's the kind of thing for major releases, and the fallout was that stuff like hwclock suddenly segfaulted.

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