OpenWrt: A Linux OS targeting embedded devices

127 pykello 73 9/8/2025, 4:13:10 PM openwrt.org ↗

Comments (73)

CursedSilicon · 57m ago

I'm a staunch defender of OpenWRT. Having used just about every "router distro" folks care to name (remember SmoothWall?) for the last 20~ years, OpenWRT is built like a tank and just keeps trundling along

I hope their experiments with the "OpenWRT One" keep going. I'd love to see OpenWRT take a (deserved) bite out of the "SMB firewall vendors" like Netgate or OPNsense. Or just undercutting Wi-Fi vendors like Ubiquiti who base their work on OpenWRT anyway

Something I'm excited to try myself in future is running "OpenWISP" [1] to manage a small fleet (three) OpenWRT devices in parallel for a deployment in a shared workshop. This seems to also be something that OpenWRT could be better at integrating, but it's nice to see "a vendor" tackling it

[1] https://openwisp.org/

pseudosavant · 13m ago

Ease of managing multiple OpenWRT devices is still its weakest link. OpenWRT is device centric, but I don't want to managed devices, I want to manage a network.

Modern mesh WiFi systems I've seen do that so well. I know in theory that I could create a VLAN + SSID on my OpenWRT router and APs just for iot devices to only access the internet. But setting that up on a TP-Link mesh was a couple of taps in their app. Doing it on my OpenWRT devices would be quite a bit more hassle.

fidotron · 16m ago

I definitely believe people underestimate the potential of OpenWRT as an app platform. Before getting sidelined with work I did some proof of concept WebRTC SFU on it https://github.com/atomirex/umbrella which worked surprisingly well.

Was also surprised, then not surprised, to learn it's used as the front end on many of the new generation of 3D printers.

foepys · 46m ago

OpenWISP states in its docs that you should be running at least 20 devices to make it worth it. [1] So it's not supposed to be a easy way to manage a few devices for home users.

> However, OpenWISP may not be the best fit for very small networks (fewer than 20 devices), organizations lacking IT expertise, or enterprises seeking open-source alternatives solely for cost-saving purposes.

1: https://openwisp.org/faq/#suitable

rubenbe · 21m ago

It's for exactly that reason I started with OpenSOHO. It is targeted towards the typical home and small office network with less than 20 OpenWRT devices. (although there is no hard limit).

https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho

It is still a work in progress, but it is easy to deploy (one golang binary based on pocketbase)

CursedSilicon · 3m ago

This looks a lot closer to what I'm after. Bookmarked the git repo :)

CursedSilicon · 30m ago

I saw that. Admittedly I'm only interested in a few of its functions. Namely roaming and guest hotspots

I could wire up all of that manually. But I'm excited for the chance to learn something new

zokier · 32m ago

I hope OpenWrt doesn't turn too commercial (like Netgate or opnsense) because that leads just to subscriptions, enshittification, feature gates, and drama. It is now in a good place as a solid platform to build upon, I hope it stays that way.

whalesalad · 48m ago

Related, I used to love going to the monowall website gallery to see all the labgore. It's still there like a time capsule: https://m0n0.ch/wall/gallery.php

mikepurvis · 2m ago

Been a fan for a long time and use it on my Archer C7, but I had to disable hardware switching in order to use SQM, and now the switching performance is <200mbps. Having recently upgraded to home fiber, I'm probably going to get a native Unifi router.

RomanPushkin · 10m ago

Big fan of it. Allows you to create experimental software for OpenWrt, like I did: https://github.com/ro31337/big-internet-button?tab=readme-ov...

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> The Big Internet Button breaks this cycle by introducing friction back into your internet consumption.

JimmaDaRustla · 24m ago

I used DD-WRT forever, but holy crap was it buggy. Once I tried OpenWRT, there was no going back. Shit just works, and works well.

petcat · 9m ago

Tomato on the WRT-54G was the all time best in my opinion.

mifydev · 1h ago

OpenWRT is such a good os for a router - simple but configurable UI, works reliably, I wish router companies would just ship it by default

mifydev · 1h ago

But then you get annoying firmware providers like Broadcom who refuse to write OSS drivers for linux and a lot of work is being spent on the reverse engineering

bcm4702 · 6m ago

The amusing thing about that is that broadcom, not Cisco, was the culprit in the original WRT54G GPL violation. Cisco, of course, were legally liable and should have checked that the code they obtained was not encumbered - although the usual way to do that is to specify contractually that your vendor will do the checking. It was a huge issue for them that they had tripped a customer who provided a significant fraction of their revenue into legal difficulties. I suspect that to this day, a big reason that parts of broadcom are reluctant to open-source stuff is because certain executives are still angry about the experience.

pbasista · 1h ago

Ok, but this should not be a major limiting factor.

From my experience, there is sufficient amount of routers based on well-supported chips which work okay with OpenWRT.

When I consider to buy a new router, I go to the OpenWRT device support page, filter for features I would like to get and choose one of the supported routers listed there.

fiddlerwoaroof · 1h ago

I gave up on openwrt when I realized that a lot of the recent WiFi standards seem to be badly supported. I think 802.11ac was significantly faster with vendor firmware than openwrt, for example.

echelon · 1h ago

Can we accept a pragmatic world where we have OSS + binary blobs?

That's better than a fully commercial world or a fully "pure" world with no functionality.

opan · 4m ago

Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. Things would be even worse if people didn't care about blobs.

wtallis · 34m ago

GPU vendors have come to the realization that the in-kernel driver needs to be open-source, but the userspace portion can be closed-source. There's just really no good reason to accept a design where outdated closed-source drivers could keep you from running a current kernel. WiFi NIC vendors have for generations been moving more complexity into the closed-source firmware blob that runs on the NIC's own processor core(s), so there's no good reason for the kernel driver to remain closed-source.

zokier · 24m ago

Broadcom has been doing FullMAC designs for over a decade now, and that is exactly what you describe: moving all the functionality into firmware and having thin opensource kernel driver

mifydev · 1h ago

I would love that, but it seems like they are not doing that either

rdtsc · 1h ago

OpenWrt is what I use. I picked my routers specifically to be well supported by OpenWrt, immediately wiped whatever the original firmware and installed OpenWrt and that was about ten years ago. Then when I replaced the hardware I also looked for a compatible model with OpenWrt and did the same.

I never had any issue with OpenWrt which I couldn't solve and it just works. Its uptime is pretty much the uptime since when the power goes out due to storms and such.

opan · 5m ago

Seconding all this. Ever since I had weird problems with the vendor firmware on a router, I just pick hardware I can put OpenWrt on right away. Works great.

gardnr · 52m ago

I have my fibre ont and the wifi router on a cheap battery backup. It has always continued to work even during extended power outages.

zokier · 59m ago

I love OpenWrt.

But I wished there was something similar but for "big" (in a relative sense) devices. I feel lot of the constraints OpenWrt is based on are not really that applicable when you have hundreds of megabytes of flash and RAM, and that is starting to become a common thing for routers these days. Even their own OpenWrt One router has 256M flash and a full gigabyte of RAM. That is not all that resource constrained anymore. What I would love is to have something that would be closer to "normal" linux distro while getting the networking goodies and ease of configuration from OpenWrt.

opan · 2m ago

Something with a more normal way of updating the packages and OS would be nice. I thought I'd heard someone was working on an Alpine-based thing a few years ago, but haven't heard anything since.

jauntywundrkind · 6m ago

Strongly agreed. I'd rather be running a Debian, with systemd, and boring regular utilities, than the bespoke environment openwrt has crafted together.

I'm super glad openwrt exists, and their uci config predates systemd's attempt to build a cohesive consistent whole system configuration pattern & is epic, but given the capabilities of these systems it feels so worthwhile to de-specialize the environment, to make it more boring.

What I really want is Kubernetes oriented tools that can manage hostapd & something like dawn or openert's usteer for band/ap steering. And some other ancillary wifi tools. Maybe maybe a setup for radius/enterprise, instead of just psk. You can do so much more with it, but at its core openwrt is 90% packaging for openwrt. It's not even particularly super well tuned hostapd: theres so much wireless config one can go try & enable that really is just additional 802.11 specs hostapd supports, they may improve your openwrt wifi experience.

peanut-walrus · 8m ago

Openwrt still has some strange footguns (imo) and the upgrade process is painful. I personally just prefer running general-purpose distros for my routing and firewalling needs. I realize the learning curve for this for someone who just wants a home router is unrealistic though :)

But out of all the router/firewall distros, OpenWRT it is by far the best.

horrorente · 5m ago

I just recently started using OpenWRT and only have done one upgrade, but I‘ve found it really straightforward using Attended Sysupgrade https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sy...

hd4 · 35m ago

Installed it on a TP-Link to replace my ISP router a couple days ago. I'm super impressed with how it needed almost no config (except to manually activate the Wifi and to set a password).

I'd recommend downloading the Material theme for anyone complaining about the barebones look.

xattt · 2h ago

I do find it sad/ironic/interesting to note that the router that started it all is no longer supported.

Not to bell the cat, but some sort of symbolic build for the WRT54G(L) should still be possible… right?

gforce_de · 1h ago

You can build the image yourself, but have to switch off some packages or features - otherwise the image (linux-kernel + tools) is just too large or consumes too much memory. The original router has 8 megabytes RAM-memory and 2 Megabytes flash ("storage"). You can boot a recent kernel 6.16.5, but with 8mb there is not much left to work with 8-)

A starter is here: https://intercity-vpn.de/files/openwrt/wrt54gtest/minimal/

aftbit · 1h ago

I remember swapping the TSOP packages on a WRT54 to double the RAM.

Here's a blog post about this, not sure if it was the same one I followed:

https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2010/09/upgrading-ram-in-w...

mac-attack · 11m ago

My uneducated guess is that that people that want this kind of symbolism aren't willing to actually become a maintainer and invest time in niche code for a declining user base?

Ms-J · 15m ago

Can anyone recommend a guide on the firewall?

mac-attack · 9m ago

https://youtube.com/watch?v=DWmLVDAV5kY His content helped me when I first made the plunge into OpenWRT earlier this year and realized I knew next to nothing about networking. He also has a video on policy-based routing that is cited in the PBR documentation as well.

drnick1 · 15m ago

Another option (depending on your requirements) is to use normal "workstation" Linux distro like Debian on an regular x86 PC equipped with two NICs. I added an SFP28 dual NIC to an old gaming PC and now use it as a router/home server and can saturate the link (25Gbps). I get north of 4Gbps through Wireguard too. Routing and the firewall are built into the kernel so you don't really need a specific distro. I just added a DNS server (Unbound in recursive mode) and a DHCP server. For WiFi I use hostapd, but an external AP would be a better solution for most people.

esseph · 2h ago

A lot of companies were built on this.

aftbit · 1h ago

The first DJI drones (original Phantom at least) used OpenWRT on their "Range Extender" boxes.

CursedSilicon · 1h ago

Ubiquiti uses a fork of OpenWRT. Starlink's routers run it as well. I'm sure a ton of other vendors are using it

wtallis · 26m ago

The WiFi silicon vendors seem to base their SDK/reference software on OpenWRT (albeit often badly-outdated versions), so almost everyone selling a WiFi box ends up using some variant or fork of OpenWRT. It's been a long time since the days of Linksys trying to cut DRAM costs by using something other than Linux. There are still exceptions like MikroTik where the OS and configuration tools are a main selling point (still Linux-based, but not OpenWRT).

nine_k · 2h ago

It's fun to see that "Amazon choice" portable routers are based on OpenWRT, and run OpenVPN and Wireguard out of the box.

shadowgovt · 1h ago

And all it took was forcing one company to divulge its proprietary closed-source codebase because they screwed up and incorporated copyleft code deep into their core.

Imagine how much progress could be made if a few other companies were forced to crack open their proprietary closed-source codebases...

_mu · 2h ago

all my routers run TOMATO

poisonborz · 2h ago

Apples and oranges. It is a nice tool for closed-source Broadcom devices that OpenWRT will never support. Otherwise it has nowhere near the complexity and features.

champtar · 2h ago

Curious what are the main benefits ? (I've only ever used DD-WRT and OpenWrt)

ZenoArrow · 1h ago

I use Tomato too, but I wouldn't say it offers many benefits over OpenWrt. The main thing is that routers based on Broadcom chipsets often only work with very old Linux kernels (such as 2.6.xx kernels), as the drivers are closed source. For these routers, the primary third-party router OS choice is to use Tomato.

Bender · 1h ago

All of mine are Alpine Linux. No UI but small, simple.

opan · 19s ago

Have you written anything about setting this up somewhere?

aborsy · 1h ago

Couldn’t developers of OpenWRT come up with a better UI?

It’s not user friendly at all.

mzajc · 1h ago

Please for the love of all that is good do not change/remove the Bootstrap 2 LuCI theme. It's such a great and pragmatic design.

aborsy · 1h ago

I come from OPNSense (different use case). Nice well-designed robust UI, even if people say opnsense is flexible and thus complex.

Given that, I feel GL-inet users rarely visit the advanced section (Luci).

wtallis · 53m ago

Could you provide any specifics? Are you wanting a dumbed-down UI that hides most of the functionality, or are you wanting the existing functionality to be exposed to the user differently?

numpad0 · 38m ago

IMO it's valid criticism and at the same time IMO GUIs are unnecessary frills.

If you've tried Cisco routers - you can export ALL configurations by running command `show running-configuration`, or `display current-configuration` on Huawei routers, or `show configuration commands`on Vyatta/VyOS/EdgeOS, which can then be restored onto a brand new router by just right click pasting that log into the ssh session.

That's VASTLY superior to ANY GUI. IMO. YMMV. IANAL. Views are my own. But it is.

mzajc · 20m ago

All UCI configuration on OpenWRT is stored in /etc/config/, and exporting/importing it is as simple as one scp command. The GUI is great for discoverability, on the other hand.

zokier · 21m ago

It is convenient then that Luci (openwrts web ui) is based on top of uci which is fully exposed through a CLI and/or config files.

hd4 · 33m ago

Get the Material theme.

gardnr · 43m ago

What is your point of reference? What would you compare it to?

I find it easy to understand and to use. From my outside perspective it seems like basically just Linux with a nice web UI.

realz · 2h ago

What’s new with OpenWrt?

nine_k · 2h ago

Relatively recently (early 2025) they've completed a serious rework, and released a new version, with WiFi 7 support.

Otherwise it Just Works™, as it should.

esafak · 2h ago

Apparently they released a router last year.

pseudosavant · 2h ago

This is actually probably the best thing OpenWRT have done in quite a while. I got two (one for a backup) and I've been super happy. I've happily used TP-Link, GL.iNet, and Raspberry Pi 4 devices, with OpenWRT in the past, but nothing beats the "it just works" aspect of a first party device designed for this, fully open, and a reasonable price.

Most off-the-shelf devices have too slow of CPU for a low latency/buffer router. The Raspberry Pi 4 is easily fast enough but needs to use USB3 network adapters which require packages not in the default rpi4 OpenWRT image. Not insurmountable, but a consistent pain every upgrade.

aftbit · 1h ago

I ended up building my own image of OpenWRT to make the package hell better on upgrade, and as a bonus, I was able to build in my configs too. Recovering from a failed Pi was as simple as flashing the most-recently-built image. Upgrading just required rebuilding the image (and resolving whatever went wrong, of course, though it was usually pretty light). As a bonus, it's easy to swap SD cards on the Pi so I can have the last "known good" config available while taking the update.

Now I run OpenWRT on one of those x86 mini PC boxes with 4x 2.5GBe Intel NICs because my wirespeed is 2 Gbps symmetric, so I needed just a bit more oomph than the Pi could provide. The hardware is somehow even _less_ reliable than a Pi 4 - I'm already on my third machine in 3 years. I would love to find something more reliable.

pseudosavant · 22m ago

OpenWRT has also made it incredibly easy to package in any arbitrary pkg into image downloads from their website. You don't need your own build infrastructure now.

I'm curious what your experience would be like with a Pi5/CM5 solution using PCIe for your ethernet. It is pretty easy to have spare boards and SD cards around for Pi setups. I've had good reliability with Pi setups using good passive cooling (no fan to die).

navigate8310 · 1h ago

There's soon going to be a new one manufactured by GL.iNet for OpenWrt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43512495

0cf8612b2e1e · 24m ago

Not a huge fan of the design decisions on that one. $250 target makes it a hard sell to anyone but network nerds. At $100, I would have no issues making that the default recommendation for anyone, regardless of technical knowledge. Being a premium point requires justifications beyond open source warm and fuzzies.

Network enthusiasts are likely to already have separate switches and WiFi points. Let the router just route.

postpawl · 2h ago

They’ve added support for a lot of switches. https://svanheule.net/switches/models

wslh · 1h ago

Is it recommended performance and feature-wise to use OpenWRT on Ubiquiti's switches?

wtallis · 55m ago

The CPU in such switches is far too slow to do any data plane operations, so performance is entirely due to the hardware switching. Replacing Ubiquiti's OS with OpenWRT just gets you a different management interface for configuring the hardware features that actually handle traffic. (Unless for some reason you desperately want to have a VPN endpoint that would be limited to a few Mb/s at best.)

alt227 · 1h ago

Ubiquiti make great hardware, however a lot of people hate the software as it is buggy and inconsistent. This at least gives those people options to run something a bit more opoen and manageable under the hood.

fiatjaf · 42m ago

An easy-to-setup OpenWrt-based plugin to sell internet for satoshis: https://tollgate.me/

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OpenWrt: A Linux OS targeting embedded devices

Comments (73)