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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

#51
post #48
post #21

Now if they could just get rid of Linux underneath and use something with better security. L4, maybe. After all, this is for embedded devices which basically run one program.

As far as I remember, L4 is such a minimal beast that you typically run something like a Linux-Kernel inside it, to do most of the boring stuff. And then use the guarantees on isolation provided by L4 to have timing or security critical functions into their own L4 tasks. Am I wrong there? But even if L4 would provide the minimal set of functions expected to pass packets on an embedded device like a router: Would you…

Linux is the last choice for a good userland kernel.

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

#52
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why parent is being downvoted. Linux probably isn't the best OS for this, a microkernel OS or something based on BSD seems to be far saner, especially since we don't need weird hardware support, all home routers use the same three or four families of MIPS and ARM SoCs.

Home routers come with one of three instruction set families (MIPS, ARM, PowerPC) with CPUs or SoCs from at least six major manufacturers (Broadcom, Qualcomm-Atheros, Ralink/MediaTek, Marvell, Freescale/NXP, Realtek) and WiFi interfaces from any of them except Freescale but plus Quantenna. And there are multiple generations of hardware in the market at any one time. That adds up to a hardware ecosystem that is vastly…

What about {net|free|open}BSD?

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

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The devs have put up their meeting notes. http://meetings.lede-project.org/lede-adm/2016/lede-adm.2016... There is some discussion starting around 1230. My reading is that they thought that the OpenWPT reputation re: development matters was poor.

BTW that seems to be a nifty irc bot: http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot

We use it widely with projects we support at the Linux Foundation. It's great!

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like the rpi3 may have onboard ethernet and wifi, but it's still just one ethernet (100Mbit to boot) and single band wifi. The point still stands that a $30 router blows away a rpi in terms of network connectivity (which should matter for a router).

Sadly, no, the Raspberry Pi 3 still seems to do everything over the USB bus. It'd make an awful router. See https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/raspberry-pi-3-specs-bench... : > The Raspberry Pi 3 shares the same SMSC LAN9514 chip as its predecessor, the Raspberry Pi 2, adding 10/100 Ethernet connectivity and four USB channels to the board. As before, the SMSC chip connects to the SoC via a single USB channel, acting a…

> Sadly, no, the Raspberry Pi 3 still seems to do everything over the USB bus. It'd make an awful router

Not exactly, the BT/WiFi chip is apparently running via SDIO.

But yes, that doesn't help with the Ethernet situation. I don't get why Broadcom, when they already do a custom SoC, didn't include one or two MII lines and use a real Ethernet PHY instead.

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

#56

oh boy more fragmentation! I wish the devs behind OpenWrt, dd-wrt, and LEDE would just work together for god's sake. OpenWrt is far from complete. the documentation alone is terrible.

Indeed. I increasingly find myself just biting the bullet and using x86 machines with Debian/Arch instead of OpenWRT. The quadrupled hardware cost is more than offset by having well-documented software.

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

#58
post #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.

What about the reasons stated in the post?

    Number of active core developers at an all time low, no process for getting more new people involved.

    Unreliable infrastructure, fixes prevented by internal disagreements and single points of failure.

    Lack of communication, transparency and coordination in the OpenWrt project, both inside the core team and between the core team and the rest of the community.

    Not enough people with commit access to handle the incoming flow of patches, too little attention to testing and regular builds.

    Lack of focus on stability and documentation.

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

#59
post #52
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home routers come with one of three instruction set families (MIPS, ARM, PowerPC) with CPUs or SoCs from at least six major manufacturers (Broadcom, Qualcomm-Atheros, Ralink/MediaTek, Marvell, Freescale/NXP, Realtek) and WiFi interfaces from any of them except Freescale but plus Quantenna. And there are multiple generations of hardware in the market at any one time. That adds up to a hardware ecosystem that is vastly…

What about {net|free|open}BSD?

Their hardware support is not as good as Linux, especially for WiFi and for embedded SoCs. Their network stacks are lacking in more advanced features like QoS that's not from the '90s (AQM, FQ, traffic shaping that accounts for the overhead your DSL or cable modem adds) and I'm not aware of any efforts to eliminate bufferbloat from NIC drivers the way BQL has for most Linux Ethernet drivers. I'm not sure how Linux compares against the BSDs for dumb packet forwarding and NAT performance, but for real-world performance the better QoS makes it no contest.

Linux is what the chipset manufacturers target, it's what the router manufacturers ship, it's what most of the academics seem to turn to when they're not using a network simulator, and Linux seems to have the most active networking developers. The only compelling argument for BSDs is that pf.conf is more approachable than the Linux tools, but BSD advocates usually don't mention that it's because pf does a lot less than tc and the other Linux tools.

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

#60
post #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.

What about the reasons stated in the post? Number of active core developers at an all time low, no process for getting more new people involved. Unreliable infrastructure, fixes prevented by internal disagreements and single points of failure. Lack of communication, transparency and coordination in the OpenWrt project, both inside the core team and between the core team and the rest of the community. Not enough peopl…

All of these are made worse by a fork.

[Edit:] Since I am getting downvoted let me get through their stated reasons:

    Number of active core developers at an all time low, 
    no process for getting more new people involved.
A fork is cutting the number of available devs in half and creates uncertainty for new people. So it should hurt in the short term.

    Unreliable infrastructure, fixes prevented by
    internal disagreements and single points of failure.
Then fix the infrastructure. ( If the fixes are actually prevented by internal disagreement, this may be a argument for a fork.)

    Lack of communication, transparency and coordination 
    in the OpenWrt project, both inside the core team 
    and between the core team and the rest of the 
    community.
This may or may not be improved by a fork. It is certainly easier to manage a community half the size and a fork may be a fresh start, but it seems a better idea to try to improve their process.

    Not enough people with commit access to handle
    the incoming flow of patches, too little 
    attention to testing and regular builds.
Not enough people, so we are splitting the team.

    Lack of focus on stability and documentation.
To some extend documentation and testing profit from enough available manpower.

Apart from the "internal disagreement" argument all of these arguments may be pain points but are not really arguments for forking the project, some are orthogonal some are actually arguments against a fork. So I wish them the best, but from the outside this fork does not look promising.

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