OpenWrt 23.05.0-rc4 - Fourth Release Candidate - 3 October 2023

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 OpenWrt 23.05.0-rc4, r23482-7fe85ce1f2
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The OpenWrt community is proud to announce the fourth release candidate of the upcoming OpenWrt 23.05 stable series.

This is just a release candidate and not the final release yet.

Download firmware images via the Firmware Selector or directly from our download servers:

• Download firmware image for your device (firmware selector)
• Download firmware images directly from OpenWrt download servers

An upgrade from OpenWrt 22.03 to OpenWrt 23.05 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 23.05. (see “Upgrading” below).

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.

Do you want to be informed about important changes such as new releases and security fixes?

We have a new mailing list for this, as well as RSS options: see Important changes and announcements.

For a detailed list of changes since OpenWrt 23.05.0-rc3 see the 23.05.0-rc4 changelog.

Changes in this release candidate since the previous 23.05.0-rc3 release candidate are:

• New devices
  • ipq4019: ZTE MF287 Pro aka DreiNeo Pro
  • mediatek: Ubiquiti UniFi 6 LR v3
  • ramips: ALFA Network AX1800RM
• Updated components:
  • kernel: Update from 5.15.127 to 5.15.132
  • mt76: Updated from 2023-07-26 to 2023-08-14
  • hostapd: Update from 2023-06-22 to 2023-09-08
  • ucode: Update from 2023-04-03 to 2023-06-06
  • ubus: Update from 2022-06-15 to 2023-06-05
  • netifd: Update from 2023-06-04 to 2023-09-19
  • wireless-regdb: update from 2023.05.03 to 2023.09.01
  • openssl: Update from 3.0.10 to 3.0.11
• mediatek: lots of backports from master
• ipq806x: Fix traffic speed regression
• mac80211: rework MT7620 PA/LNA RF calibration
• kernel: enable vfio and vfio-pci for armsr-armv8
• ath11k: Revert back ath11k firmware to fix IPv6 multicast problems
• kernel: allow adding devices without hw offload to a hw flowtable
• kernel: backport support for renaming netdevs while up
• hostapd: backport from master, including ucode based reload support
• packages: Add many PKG_CPE_ID attributes

Many other changes in all parts of OpenWrt, see Changelog for details.

OpenWrt 23.05.0-rc4 incorporates over 4200 commits since branching the previous OpenWrt 22.03 release and has been under development for over one year.

Only the main changes are listed below. See changelog-23.05.0-rc4 for the full changelog.

OpenWrt 23.05 supports over 1794 devices. Support for over 200 new devices was added in addition to the device support by OpenWrt 22.03.

• The ipq807x target for the Qualcomm IPQ807x Wifi 6 SoCs was added
• The mediatek/filogic subtarget for the Mediatek Filogic 830 and 630 SoCs was added
• The sifiveu target for the HiFive RISC-V Unleashed and Unmatched boards

• Switched ipq40xx target to DSA
• VDSL support on AVM FRITZ!Box 7530
• Support for devices with 2.5G PHYs
  • Acer Predator W6 (MT7986A), Mercusys MR90X v1 (MT7986BLA), Netgear WAX206 (MT7622), Netgear WAX220 (MT7986), ZyXEL NWA50AX Pro (MT7981) Asus (TUF Gaming) AX4200 (MT7986A), Netgear WAX218 (IPQ8074), Xiaomi AX9000 (IPQ8074), Dynalink DL-WRX36 (IPQ8074)
• 2 Gbps WAN/LAN NAT Routing on ramips MT7621 devices (See OpenWrt forum)
• Improved DSL statistics on ubus and in LuCI

OpenWrt switched the default cryptographic library from wolfssl to mbedtls. This library is used for HTTPS/TLS in the Webserver providing LuCI and for the cryptographic operations in hostapd. mbedtls provides security updates in their LTS branch without changing the application binary interface (ABI) of the library. wolfssl provides a stable ABI only for a very limited subset of functions. mbedtls allows us to update only mbedtls without the need to recompile and upgrade all users of mbedtls.

Core components have the following versions in 23.05.0-rc4:

• Updated toolchain:
  • musl libc 1.2.4
  • glibc 2.37
  • gcc 12.3.0
  • binutils 2.40
• Updated Linux kernel
  • 5.15.132 for all targets
• Network:
  • hostapd master snapshot from September 2023, dnsmasq 2.89, dropbear 2022.82
  • cfg80211/mac80211 from kernel 6.1.24
• System userland:
  • busybox 1.36.1

In addition to the listed applications, many others were also updated.

Sysupgrade can be used to upgrade a device from 22.03 to 23.05, and configuration will be preserved in most cases.

Sysupgrade from 21.02 to 23.05 is not officially supported.

• lantiq/xrx200 target is not build because the DSA driver still shows some error messages. Fix is planned before the final OpenWrt 23.05 release.

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

Have fun!

The OpenWrt Community