Alternative router firmware: what are DD-WRT, OpenWrt, Tomato & ASUSwrt Merlin
Alternative Router Firmware: What are DD-WRT, OpenWrt, Tomato, and ASUSwrt Merlin?
Just like the operating system on your computer & cell phone, you can change the software running on your router.
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Ever since I found out my old Netgear R7800 didn't have a functional IPv6 firewall, I've been riding happily on the OpenWrt train. Now I absolutely refuse to buy routers that I can't flash with OpenWrt.
I'm a bit surprised OpenWrt is in the same list as the rest. It really is in a league of its own on a technical and functional level. OpenWrt is much closer to a typical server Linux OS. Yes you can use it as a dumb flash-it-and-go firmware replacement on supported hardware, but it can do so much more.
You can also run openwrt on x86 boxes and not just a random selection of embedded devices. That might feel silly, but you get the benefit of Linux's more advanced bufferbloat mitigation and a nice clean and relatively easy to understand UI.
Not silly at all for multi-gig connections. I'm running it on Pi 4 which does well for a 1Gbps connection with SQM. Sometimes it's cheaper to get old x86 hatdware to do the same. Or I've heard you could run it in a Docker container on a bigger machine.
Or I’ve heard you could run it in a Docker container on a bigger machine
You can definitely run it in a VM (which is how I handle it) but container support wouldn't surprise me.
The "silly" part was more that if you have x86 you can use opnsense/pfsense but I'm with you in that SQM is a big draw as well as less risk of compatibility issues as my APs are also flashed with openwrt. And the BSDs were well behind on wireguard support when I first switched to x86, although they have since caught up now I believe.
Exactly, standardization is a very significant pro. Hardware support being a dependency for standardization. I wrote a simple SaltStack module for OpenWrt and I'm using that to manage the config of multiple OpenWrt devices across multiple locations. That happens to live along with the rest of my Salt code which manages everything else.
I was actually under the impression that DD-WRT was sort of on-par, but then again I've never tried it.