FAQ before installing OpenWrt

1. Please see the buyerguide for features you could be looking for.
2. Please decide yourself which ones are important to you.
3. Then ask in the OpenWrt Forum (or anywhere else) for personal recommendations.

Please check current TableOfHardware for the list of supported devices.

The beginner's guide should hook you up.

→ downloads

• a factory image is one built for the bootloader flasher or stock software flasher
• a sysupgrade image (previously named trx image) is designed to be flashed from within openwrt itself

The two have the same content, but a factory image would have extra header information or whatever the platform needs. Generally speaking, the factory image is to be used with the OEM GUI or OEM flashing utilities to convert the device to OpenWrt. After that, use the sysupgrade images.

• a uImage is a tagged linux image expected by the u-boot loader
• a tftp image is XXX
• a vmlinux.bin image is XXX
• a vmlinux.elf “image” is XXX

→ Choosing an Openwrt version

→ generic.flashing

Flash devices can be written to, at minimum, anywhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 times (according to the manufacturers). Keep in mind we have a normal distribution and also, that Flash never ever just stops working, but merely distinct blocks do. I.e. you won't be able to write to them any longer, but you should be able to still read them.

Start here → toolchain

CONFIG_ALL=y + make V=99 IGNORE_ERRORS=m

Because everything light-weight tends to be highly modular. Compare: lightweight tube vs. heavy weight tube

There are claims all over the web, that OpenWrt can only be handled by command-line. There is a beginners guide available:CLI.

There is one WebUIs available LuCI, LuCI2 is in development.

Older versions of OpenWrt could support X-Wrt and Gargoyle The X Window System feed is probably broken/untested and outdated for a long time (status: BB, 2014)

• brcm-2.4: heavily modified Linux kernel version 2.4, wl (or wl-mimo) proprietary driver, nas authentificator, wlc control utility
• brcm47xx: vanilla Linux kernel version 2.6/3, b43 reverse engineered FOSS driver, wpad (hostapd + wpa_supplicant), standard linux utilites (iw, iwconfig, etc.)

It is reported as still debatable which wireless driver is better for stability and performance. brcm-2.4 is still available in the latest OpenWrt stable, but has been abandoned in trunk as of Rxxxxx.

Note: At least as of 10.3.1 stable, it is possible to build 2.6 kernel with proprietary Broadcom drivers. No precompiled images have been posted yet though. If your target is brcm47xx, it will build 2.6 kernel, no matter what the wireless drivers are. --- sup 2012/05/07 11:53

brcm47xx stability issue It has been reported that brcm47xx has issues when router is under heavy load.

From package/madwifi/Makefile:

ifdef CONFIG_MADWIFI_DEBUG
  MADWIFI_APPLETS += athdebug 80211debug
endif

So first enable the “Advanced configuration options (for developers)” item, then navigate to the kmod-madwifi submenu and tick “Enable compilation of debugging features” on or add/replace “CONFIG_DEVEL=y” plus “CONFIG_MADWIFI_DEBUG=y” manually in .config