Meeting notes - 14th February 2022 virtual meeting

Date: 14th February 2022

Participants: pepe2k, Hauke, rsalvaterra, lach1012, jow, tmomas, rmilecki, stintel, Paul, Kaloz, Daniel, wigyori, blocktrron, Adrian, lynxis, John, richb-hanover

• firewall4
  • overall looks good some minor problems
  • problems with packaging iptables-nft
• kernel 5.10
  • bcm63xx not on kernel 5.10
    • Paul and Hauke discuss later
  • 5.4 vs. 5.10 on imx6/cortexa9 USB broken (someone reported issue with Hummingboard2 Gate) → not confirmed yet
    • not blocking
    • will be checked on a wandboard
• broken 802.11s on MT7622 and MT7915E
  • Paul will ask Felix directly and tries again
• DSA for ipq40xx? (https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/4721)
  • open question: is there a performance regression?
  • does the ipq40xx dsa survive 20gib without locking up?
• Any feature missing? (Hauke)
  • Anything missing for a RC1?
    • nothing missing
• Possible to branch off in 1 week and have a RC1 in 2 weeks? (Hauke)
  • I would like to have a RC1 soon after branching off
• Not branch now, but make everything stable a bit now
  • prevent backporting a lot of stuff
  • do feature freeze on master
    • no big changes, like new subsystems, build system changes
  • freeze on ~1. March
  • branch off on ~20. March
  • Paul creates issue with a list of branch blocking topics, should be extended by everyone
  • Hauke send mail with plan

• e.g. mt7613 (mt7613 or mt7603?), qca ac wave1
  • Marvell wifi
  • mt7620/rt2x00
• alternatively flag them + produce warning on login via SSH or LuCI
  • it is possible to have this in LuCI, but having there a database could be problematic
  • can we query it from the driver?
    • Extend upstream kernel drivers with quirks like it is done for PCI and USB devices
      • get changes also upstream
  • Previously we shipped them also. Would affect a lot of devices
  • Sometimes also problems with broken clients (e.g. Old Intel wifi drivers)
  • Wiki is preferred
    • The table of hardware has links to the wifi driver, e.g. https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/driver.wlan/mt76 → all those driver pages need to be filled / reviewed by someone knowledgeable. Any volunteers?
  • WPA3 not working on some devices, probably mostly driver and FW problem

• Waiting for 21.02 LuCI backports form Jo
• wolfssl update for 19.07
• Any other blockers?
• wolfssl problem:
  • accessing it early causes “no cipher overlap” error message
    • could be an entropy problem

• Options:
  • Colocate with Wireless Battle Mesh
    • still looking for a place and date
  • Colocate with Open Source Summit Europe (Linux Con, embedded Linux conference)
    • September 13 – 16, 2022, Dublin
• Some prefer Wireless Battle Mesh
• COVID-19 could be a problem
• we will not really organize something, but endorse it
  • have a side meeting there

• Suppose someone proposes a new feature/new way of working. (Obviously, it has to provide benefit/value to a broad set of people, and not be insecure/dangerous/etc.)
• What process do we use to make the decision?
• I have two examples where the conversation evolved/could evolve into a discussion of the merits of the proposal, instead of what decision process we use for inclusion.
• An example: Someone on the forum wanted to extend OpenWrt announce a mDNS name, but only if it gets into the default.
  • technical probably easy by adding umdnsd
• Process: Make an RFC and describe it in detail on the mailing list. Having a working prototype will makes it more likely to get response.

• There are some kickoff mails, but nothing more happened yet
• We like this idea
• SFC took over Digital Ocean payment using our account
• hosting for git, forum, wiki… is the expensive part
• Move to OSUOSL as an option it would be free, digital ocean is pretty expensive
  • SFC suggested this
• lynxis will ask Hetzner for sponsoring

• makes sense
• static code analyzing is also useful
  • we have already Coverity: https://scan.coverity.com/projects/openwrt (just use “add me to project” and someone will approve)
• We have fuzzing integrated for libubox already
  • ynezz did this some time ago
• Paul wants to integrate with Google fuzzer project
• automation is easier when it is on github compared to our own infrastructure

Next meeting in about 4 weeks.