OpenWrt 19.07.0 - First Stable Release - 6 January 2020

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 OpenWrt 19.07.0, r10860-a3ffeb413b
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The OpenWrt community is proud to announce the first stable release of the OpenWrt 19.07 stable version series. It incorporates 3954 commits since the previous release 18.06.0 and 85 commits since the last release candidate 19.07.0-rc2.

An upgrade from OpenWrt 18.06 to OpenWrt 19.07 is supported in many cases with the help of the sysupgrade utility which will also attempt to preserve the configuration. A configuration backup is advised nonetheless when upgrading to OpenWrt 19.07.

The OpenWrt Project is a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices. It is a complete replacement for the vendor-supplied firmware of a wide range of wireless routers and non-network devices. See the Table of Hardware for supported devices. For more information about OpenWrt project organization, see the About OpenWrt pages.

Get OpenWrt Firmware at: https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/

With the 19.07 major release, the OpenWrt project brings all supported targets back to a single common kernel version and further refines and broadens existing device support. It also introduces a new ath79 target and brings support for WPA3.

The 19.07 major release provides initial support for the new ath79 target, the future device tree based successor of the popular ar71xx target. For 19.07, both targets are still built, but it is recommended to switch to the ath79 target whenever possible: future releases of OpenWrt will drop support for the ar71xx target. See the ath79 technical reference for rationale about the transition.

To perform the upgrade, please follow the instructions from Upgrading from ar71xx to ath79. Functionality for a given device should be equivalent between the two targets: if this is not the case, please report the issue and revert back to ar71xx if needed.

The 19.07 major release brings initial support for WPA3. However, WPA3 is not enabled by default and requires installing specific packages: to run WPA3 as an access point, hostapd-openssl is needed. For use as a Wi-Fi station, you need either wpa-supplicant-openssl (station support only) or wpad-openssl (AP + station). Due to their large size, these packages are not installed by default, and it is impossible to install them on devices with less than 8MB flash.

It should also be noted that many existing client devices will never support WPA3, and that there are client devices that support WPA2 but cannot connect to an AP configured with WPA2+WPA3 mixed mode. Please only file bugs if you are sure the problem is not client related.

To configure your device as a WPA3 access point, see wpa_modes

The new version of LuCI, the integrated web interface for OpenWrt, implements client-side rendering of views. This improves performance by offloading some work that was done on the device (Lua code) to the client browser (Javascript code)

The LuCI ecosystem is large, and not all LuCI apps have been adapted to this change, which may result in crashes involving cbi.lua. In that case, install the luci-compat package.

If LuCI is loading slowly, consider installing uhttpd-mod-ubus, close and reopen the browser tab to start a new LuCI session.

With this step, Lua usage in LuCI is reduced and LuCI effectively comes closer to the goals of the experimental LuCI2 without having to rewrite everything from scratch.

Here is a selection of known issues with 19.07.0:

• Sysupgrade from ar71xx to ath79 and vice versa is not officially supported and will not work on all devices, please see Upgrading from ar71xx to ath79.
• Several devices that are supported in ar71xx are not yet supported in ath79: this is a community effort. Helping to port devices to ath79 to make them available in future 19.07.X releases is very welcome.
• Images for some device became too big to support a persistent overlay, causing such models to lose configuration after a reboot. If you experience this problem, please report the affected device in the forum and consider downgrading to OpenWrt 18.06 or using the Image Builder to pack a smaller custom image
• Some optional GUI packages crash with an error about missing “cbi.lua”, install the luci-compat package to fix these
• Possible Wi-Fi performance issues on 5 GHz. If you encounter such an issue, please see existing bug reports (FS#2679, FS#2563, FS#2682) or file a new bug report against openwrt-19.07. Please make sure the issue is not caused by WPA3. If you are using WPA3 and run into problems, revert to the encryption settings you used before upgrading to 19.07.
• Unstable Ethernet link with atheros switch on some ath79 devices (such as TL-WR841N): FS#2216, FS#2730

Other potential issues can be found in the bug reports.

The main changes in this release since the previous OpenWrt 18.06 version are:

• Updated toolchain:
  • musl libc 1.1.24
  • uClibc-ng 1.0.31
  • glibc 2.27
  • gcc 7.5.0
  • binutils 2.31.1
• Updated Linux kernel
  • 4.14.162 for all targets
  • Flow offloading bugfixes
• Network userland:
  • hostapd 2.9, dnsmasq 2.80, dropbear 2019.78
  • Fixes in network and wireless configuration handling
  • Bugfixes in DHCPv6 client and server
  • WPA3 configuration support
    • Install wpad-openssl for WPA3 support
    • Documentation: wpa_modes
• System userland:
  • busybox 1.30.1
  • Sysupgrade support for backup and upgrade capability checks
  • Contains urngd, non-physical true random number generator daemon based on timing jitter
  • Bugfixes in the process manager, system message bus, embedded web server and the configuration management library
• Platform and Driver Support
  • Dropped adm5120, adm8668, ar7, au1000, ixp4xx, mcs814x, omap24xx, ppc40x, ppc44x and xburst target
  • New ath79 target that will replace the popular ar71xx target
  • Updates and new device support across all targets
• LuCI web interface:
  • Client side rendering of views for improved performance
  • Security fixes

A full list of all changes and security fixes is available in the detailed changelog.

As always, a big thank you goes to all our active package maintainers, testers, documenters, and supporters.

Have fun!

The OpenWrt Community