Used device already flashed with 25.12.5 for a few bucks

No particular use in mind, just want to get familiar with openwrt.

Opinions?

A configuration backup is important, but it does not capture every reason an upgrade can fail. Custom feeds, renamed packages, opkg-to-apk changes, a resized root filesystem, device-specific partition behavior, and services that depend on extra files can all make a preserved `/etc/config` incomplete. A router may also appear healthy while VLANs, guest isolation, VPN routes, DDNS, multicast discovery, or rarely used firewall rules are broken.

A stronger preflight could record the exact image and target, partition layout, installed package list, custom feeds, overlay files, interface and firewall state, and an off-device backup. On x86, a full disk image may be worth keeping. After upgrade, validation would cover WAN authentication, DNS and DHCP, every VLAN and SSID, WireGuard or other tunnels, port forwards, SQM, IPv6, scheduled jobs, and recovery access before the old image is discarded.

What do you verify before and after a major version jump? Do you rehearse a clean restore from the sysupgrade archive, keep a spare router or boot medium, or prefer rebuilding from documented UCI commands instead of carrying configuration forward?

Title says it all. Has the definition moved from the FFPGA thing to standards for vendor-neutral HW? And do we now get market competition for to networking gear where the owner has unrestricted contro?

I'm running a snapshot release of OpenWRT on a R7200 and I'm currently using an old 128MB usb stick with an /overlay partition for the system storage. It's near to 85% full, so I'd like to replace it with a 4GB USB drive I have laying around.

Would it be simple enough to clone the old drive to the new and then expand and merge the extra space? Anyone have suggestions?

Hey y'all, I made an OpenWrt build for Palo Alto Network's PA-220 firewall.

I've uploaded the project on GitHub as my own repo as of now, as i feel the installation procedure is lengthy and unsuitable to add as an officially supported OpenWrt device.

Installation is definitely unlike other devices, and you can check out the installtion guide, and all other info in the repo:

GitHub: IronDemiGod/pa220-openwrt

Please check it out if you can.

I've seen a few posts on this sub, and i know some people are against projects made using AI. I did use Claude Code for the majority of this, as i do not know about embedded hardware and C programming. I do know about the working of OpenWrt and the hardware i built this for. I am currently using a PA-220 with OpenWrt as my main switch. What is your opinion on Claude Code? I would like to know. Thanks.

Been thinking about it. If i install it on my router, does it have a gui and good enough settings from the get-go? The kind of no-shit-sherlock settings you'd find on other router firmware that come by default? I want to try but it looks scary.

I’ve finished an OpenWrt port for the JioRouter AX6000 JIDU6801 (MT7986A / Filogic 830, 256 MiB SPI-NAND, 1G WAN).

The device support has been submitted upstream:

https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/25468

I also documented the hardware, partition layout, boot chain, recovery process and physical hardware testing here:

https://github.com/Kamalbura/jidu6801-research

The image builds successfully and has been tested on physical hardware. I’m mainly looking for additional JIDU6801 owners to test the port and report results on the PR, especially across different hardware revisions.

What applications do you run on your OpenWRT device? I'm curious what everyone is using it for.

Right now I'm just using mine (Netgear R7800) as an Access Point, but I'm sure I could be doing more with it. Tell us what apps you're using with OpenWRT!

BTW this post was inspired by this one - thanks to the OP, u/permafrost91.

https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/s/Dc0rqAQNkH

Hi guys,

Thanks for your replys the last time, I had a change of heart due to the useful advice. I will now deploy two different pieces of HW for OpenWRT and NextCloud.

But now I need a new HW recommendation for OpenWRT.

What I want:

1. At least 3x2.5G RJ45 Ethernet Ports (one of which should become the WAN port), can be more, 5/10G would be nice but not a must and probably conflicts with the next point. More ports for some future link aggregation might be nice. Wifi not needed at all.

2. Low power, electricity is extremely expensive where I am from (1W less is a yearly saving of 4$, 10W would be very likely far more than 400$ in 10 years). So I am willing to spend a bit more on more efficient, better optimized hardware or SoCs on newer nodes. So probably without build in WiFi to start with.

3. Some computational power for advanced DNS and Tailscale/VPN.

4. No modem required

I took a look at the Sophos devices, but the usual recommendations dont have 2.5G+, the others seem to have wifi on board and very high power draw. Mono gateway only has 1G RJ45 (and only 2 Ports with more than 1G).

So please help. And rip me a new one if I am again stupid and miss the obvious answer or if my requirements are stupid.

Thx

has anyone used dhcp hotplugs to get notified when a new device joins the network? i can't seem to get my hotplug script to work. instead of the script running, i just get an error message saying no file descriptors available.

I purchased a flint 2 and am looking to set it up with openwrt to get a good foundation to then start working on a home server.

I am however wondering if there's a guide that goes over setting openwrt up and configuring it in detail while explaining a good portion of what is happening, or if this will be a very long and research intense project.

I decided to take a crack at OpenWRT again on a free router that I got.

I installed it again from fresh since last time I had massive issues with it connecting to the outside net. (nothing I did would get the WAN to run, and allow data passing) thinking it would be fixed

once installed, it was doing the exact same thing it did back in Jan 2026.

no matter what setting I changed, created interfaces, changed interface rules, changed firewall rules. nothing, it will not pass data on the from the modem to the openwrt ac2000. the wan stays red despite the LED on the top of it showing connection (blinking, really)

did a factory reset, reinstalled, and repeated my steps. it still refuses to pass data when plugged into the modem, or directly into my UniFi Router / Firewall.

the intended purpose was to recycle it to use has a travel router and have it as a Wire Guard Client so I can access my shit from home.

so here's what it may be

1. OpenWRT isnt fully supported despite it saying so because it's got MediaTek stuff
   
2. The Router itself is just so busted that it doesn't know what to do with the newly flashed OS (well.. three different times now)
   
3. The Router itself is purely shit, and 'free' is causing me more grey hairs than it's worth for a project.

the irony is, before hand, I had a different Netgear router that I flashed OpenWRT too and it worked with no issues included the USB Port for me to share out. so why would this be such a pain in the ass? (side note: that Net Gear router literally shorted out due a hardware flaw that I wasn't really sure how it happened)

IF you have an AC2000, and it works for you, please share with me on how you did

or is this a text book definition of insanity.

What hardware are you all using these days?

I’m currently running the OpenWRT One but I’d like something more powerful, especially in the WiFi department.

The OpenWRT Two sounds intriguing but who knows if/when it will ever get released.

So what off the shelf router setup are y’all running right now?

Trying to stay with vanilla OpenWRT unless there’s good reason to switch.

Like pretty much everyone running a fixed wireless network, I have hundreds of Ubiquiti airMAX AC radios (LiteBeam Gen2, LAP-120, LAP-GPS, Loco AC) deployed on customer roofs, plus dozens sitting on shelves in the warehouse.

We all know the situation: Ubiquiti essentially put airMAX AC into maintenance mode years ago. All the vendor R&D is going into Wave 60GHz and LTU. That’s fine for greenfield deployments, but in the real world, you can’t just rip and replace 500 CPEs on rural towers when trees and distance dictate 5 GHz. Millions of these radios are going to stay on rooftops for years.

Meanwhile, the software running on them hasn't fundamentally evolved since 2017–2018. If a CPE link gets slightly noisy or misaligned, stock airOS does dumb things—like running up to 30 frame retries by default, which burns dozens of milliseconds of airtime and drags down the whole AP sector. On top of that, loaded bufferbloat easily hits 2,000+ ms during heavy uploads.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been researching what the actual physical ceiling of this QCA9880 / AR9342 hardware is if we run modern open-source networking on it (OpenWrt 24.10, Candela Technologies ath10k-ct, mac80211 AQL, CAKE, and dynamic rate-masking).

Full disclosure: I’m an everyday WISP operator. I run towers, climb roofs, crimp cables, and configure MikroTik/airMAX gear. I am NOT a Linux kernel hacker or an RF engineer with a Ph.D. So I've been using AI tools (Claude, Codex, NotebookLM) to comb through Linux wireless kernel trees, academic preprints (like MIT’s IteRate paper and TU Berlin’s hMAC), and old mailing list threads to understand what the chip can actually do.

We’ve already documented a bunch of interesting architectural facts that I rarely see discussed in WISP groups:

1. The 30-Retry Sector Killer: Upstream Qualcomm firmware enforces up to 30 retries per frame. On an outdoor link during an RF fade, a single client trying to send packets can freeze the AP channel for 50–100ms. Candela Technologies (ath10k-ct) drops this down to 4 retries, which immediately reclaims a massive chunk of airtime.
2. The Bufferbloat vs Aggregation Trap (CoTSQ): Default Linux TCP Small Queues (TSQ = 1 ms) tries to kill bufferbloat by limiting socket queues to 1–2 packets. But 802.11ac needs 32 to 64 packets in the queue to build a full A-MPDU aggregate. Starving the aggregation engine drops throughput by up to 10x because 90% of the airtime is spent on PHY headers and preambles. Bumping the queue budget to 6 ms keeps aggregates full while keeping loaded ping under 40 ms.
3. The Wave-1 Airtime Cliff: QCA9880 doesn't have hardware airtime reporting (that only started in Wave 2 chips). So Linux mac80211 has to estimate airtime based on peer stats. If peer stats aren't reporting properly, mac80211 assumes EVERY station transmits at 6 Mbps, which completely breaks airtime fairness and penalizes fast clients.
4. Why Pure TDMA is Blocked on Open QCA988x: We looked into whether we could build open TDMA like airMAX. The short answer on QCA9880 is no—the chip runs closed Xtensa firmware, can't cancel in-flight packets across PCIe, and has PCIe interrupt jitter. BUT a hybrid stack on OpenWrt (AQL + 6ms CoTSQ + Dynamic RTS/CTS to stop hidden nodes + Deficit Round-Robin airtime fairness) gets you 80-90% of the stability with open telemetry and zero vendor lock-in.

The Testbed Setup

I'm not doing this in a metal warehouse (metal walls act like an echo chamber with delay spreads that ruin 5 GHz tests). We're setting up:

• Tier 1: Benchtop SMA coaxial attenuator matrix (30–40 dB pads + splitters) for 100% clean, interference-free algorithmic sweeps.
• Tier 2: 2 APs on our main WISP office building pointing 21 meters across the street to 10–20 CPEs scattered on my residential roof. This gives real line-of-sight, real outdoor air, and clean far-field RF without receiver saturation.
• Unattended Recovery: I automated PoE injectors with relays to trigger U-Boot urescue TFTP recovery remotely so we never have to climb a ladder to press a reset button if an image bricks.

Why I'm Posting

We are calling this research project openMAX, and we opened up the entire project as a public research hub: https://github.com/wolverin0/openmax

There is zero monetization here, no crypto, no paid courses. Just an open repository of hardware notes, driver findings, recovery runbooks, and experiment plans.

Because this was researched with the help of AI agents, I want human eyes on this:

• If you're a kernel / OpenWrt dev who knows ath10k or mac80211, are our control boundary assumptions solid? Did we miss anything on ratemask-CT?
• If you're a fellow WISP operator with spare LiteBeams or NanoStations on your shelves, would you be interested in running our read-only inventory scripts to map out hardware revisions, or testing safe sysctl/CAKE queue tweaks?

Check out the repo, tear apart our docs, and let me know what you think.

Hey guys,

I am beyond a novice when it comes to network configuration. I followed OpenWRT's wiki for creating a guest network after loading Proton VPNs wireguard configuration onto my Flint 2 router. I assume that because the VPN is tunneling all network traffic, the guest network is being choked.

How do I enable the guest network to operate outside of the VPN so that my guests and their devices can connect directly?

If someone could provide me with step-by-step instructions, that would be most helpful!

Cheers!

I'm trying to make a subnet on a Raspberry Pi 4B. Its LAN works at the moment, but I'm not sure how to set it up such that it's a slave device to another router (which is connected to the modem), but has its own LAN underneath it.

Because a raspberry pi 4B only has one ethernet port, I've connected a USB 3.0 to gigabit ethernet adapter to it, so it would have two ethernet ports. The port on the adapter would go to the other router, and the port on the pi would go to my unmanaged network switch.

Again, the RPI's LAN on 192.168.222.X works fine (the RPI is 192.168.222.1), but I'm not sure how to give it internet access through the other router, which is 192.168.86.1.

Hey everyone,

I have a TP-Link Archer AX55 v1 and I’m looking to flash OpenWrt onto it. However, I can't seem to find an official installation guide or straightforward web-GUI flashing method for this specific revision.

Is there a known working procedure for flashing OpenWrt on the AX55 v1? Thanks!

I installed a stripped down firmware with LuCi interface as I needed to install Tailscale on my Tp Link Archer A6 router which has less storage.

After the install I can neither ping 192.168.1.1 or ssh into the router. Can't access the interface either to move back to the older version.

Internet and WiFi access on the router seem to work fine.

Need to setup this router as a Tailscale exit node.

Please help!

Hello! I'm loving OpenWRT, however it is missing the ability to easily 'rename' connected client devices so can at a glance see which devices are connected and if there are any that I don't recognize, etc. I understand this isn't something necessary for core router functionality, so I'm happy to install an external package that will give me this ability in Luci. I also understand that I could set static DHCP reservations for my devices and give them nicknames there, but I don't really want that necessarily. Also, the LUci interface doesn't give me an option to set that nickname when setting the static reservation (otherwise I would probably be happy with this solution). I want something that can keep me out of the command line for this. Does anyone know of any recommended packages that enable this functionality?

I purchased a FriendlyElec R6S to make my own linux router. However their software and install left a bit to be desired so I used Claude and GPT (I'm moderately techie but not enough to edit my own bootloader) to edit the boot loader and get mainline Linux installed on the R6S. I then did load testing to validate the new install. I did a baseline throughput test on the stock image which failed but passed after IRQ optimization was implemented.

I then ran the 6-hour torture test maxing all interfaces (2x2.5gig + 1x 1gig ethernet ports). When I went to new mainline Linux image. The 1gig port on the torture test failed maxing out between 600-700 Mbit when both other 2.5gig interfaces were maxed out. I accepted this performance loss as my intended use was to have the 1gig port run my wifi access point, guest network or similar where raw speed is less of an issue and figured it may be a driver or config issue that can be sorted out later.

I decided to make a generic image wrapped in an SD card installer image that'll let other people use the same setup and install it without needing to solder the serial interface leads onto the board and do a ton of fenagling. I made a website and hosted the files.

Find the downloads here: https://convulsingmuffin.com/r6s/

I also generated the throughput testing into website and a reddit post which I'll post below:

I tested all three NanoPi R6S Ethernet ports for ~6 hours: FriendlyELEC 6.1 vs Gentoo/mainline 6.18

I wanted to know whether the NanoPi R6S gives anything up when moved from FriendlyELEC’s stock Debian image to a current mainline setup, so I ran a sustained comparison across all three physical Ethernet ports.

The short version: the two PCIe 2.5GbE ports are excellent on both systems once their IRQs are pinned, but the native 1GbE port has a transmit-side performance degredation on my mainline 6.18 setup.

TL;DR

• Both 2.5GbE ports reached about 2.35 Gb/s TCP in either direction on both systems after IRQ tuning.
• Stock was better at 2.5GbE UDP transmit: about 2.30 Gb/s versus about 2.00 Gb/s on mainline.
• The native 1GbE port received at 941.5 Mb/s on both systems.
• Native-port TCP transmit was 932.8 Mb/s on stock but only 544.6 Mb/s on mainline—a 71% stock advantage.
• Native-port bidirectional traffic showed the same split: stock stayed near line rate while mainline fell to roughly 530/562 Mb/s.
• IRQ pinning produced major gains on the two 2.5GbE receive paths. It did not fix the native-port issue.
• Both optimized runs peaked at 65.6°C, with no evidence of thermal throttling.

Full formatted report: https://convulsingmuffin.com/r6s-ethernet-validation/

Systems under test

The hardware was the same NanoPi R6S; only the boot media/software stack changed.

FriendlyELEC stock:

• Debian 13 (trixie)
• Linux 6.1.141
• Vendor r8125 driver for both PCIe 2.5GbE ports
• st_gmac for the native 1GbE port

Mainline system:

• Gentoo
• Linux 6.18.38
• Mainline r8169 for both PCIe 2.5GbE ports
• st_gmac for the native 1GbE port

Both used iperf 3.21. The same R6S, peers, cables, stream counts, test order, durations, offered UDP loads, and acceptance thresholds were used.

Physical setup and duration

• 2.5G LAN port → AQC113 peer running Atlantic
• 2.5G WAN port → RTL8125B peer running r8169
• Native 1G port → Intel peer running igb
• Three direct 15-foot Cat6 24AWG cables; no switch in the traffic path
• 2.5G: four TCP streams and UDP at 4 × 575 Mb/s
• 1G: two TCP streams and UDP at 2 × 460 Mb/s

Qualification phases ran for 300 seconds one-way and 600 seconds bidirectional. Sustained phases ran for 1,800 seconds one-way, 3,600 seconds bidirectional, and 900 seconds for UDP. Long phases were split into 600-second evidence segments, with a 600-second cooldown between default and optimized aggregates.

Optimized results

All numbers are weighted Mb/s. TX and RX are from the R6S perspective.

IRQ affinity mattered

The optimized policy pinned the 2.5G LAN port to CPU 5, the 2.5G WAN port to CPU 6, and the native 1G port to CPU 4.

Stock default → optimized included:

• 2.5G LAN TCP RX: 2085.6 → 2353.7 Mb/s (+12.9%)
• 2.5G LAN bidirectional RX: 1751.7 → 2348.1 Mb/s (+34.0%)
• 2.5G LAN UDP RX: 1114.0 → 2300.1 Mb/s (+106.5%)
• 2.5G WAN TCP RX: 2085.6 → 2353.7 Mb/s (+12.9%)
• 2.5G WAN bidirectional RX: 1771.5 → 2350.4 Mb/s (+32.7%)
• 2.5G WAN UDP RX: 1114.0 → 2300.0 Mb/s (+106.5%)

Mainline also needed receive-side IRQ placement on the 2.5G ports. For example, 2.5G LAN bidirectional RX improved from 1424.6 to 2347.7 Mb/s and UDP RX from 1518.9 to 2298.3 Mb/s.

The native 1G port did not materially improve with the same tuning. Because RX ties stock at 941.5 Mb/s while TX falls far behind, I suspect something relatively narrow in the R6S st_gmac transmit path, device tree, DMA/queue configuration, or clock setup. That is an inference, not a proven root cause.

Failures and caveats

• The optimized stock run cleared every throughput and loss threshold. Its overall nonzero status came from eth2 rx_missed_errors +31 and small private-counter growth.
• The optimized mainline run missed the native 1G TX and bidirectional thresholds. One 2.5G LAN UDP-TX segment also measured 0.558% loss against a strict 0.500% ceiling.
• The first stock attempt was excluded from the clean comparison. During its default bidirectional phase, the AQC113 peer stopped passing frames while carrier remained up. Cycling the peer interface restored it. I preserved that failed attempt, reset all peers, and reran the complete comparison from the beginning.
• The stock kit needed a compatibility-only change because the vendor r8125 driver exposed stale IRQ entries in sysfs. The patch ignored IRQ numbers without live affinity files in /proc; it did not change traffic, timing, streams, rates, or thresholds.
• Both optimized runs peaked at 65.6°C, so the gap does not look thermal.
• The R6S and peer evidence archives were checksum-verified and copied off the test systems.

Practical conclusion

I am keeping Gentoo/mainline on the box. With IRQ pinning, the two 2.5GbE ports are essentially as fast as stock for sustained TCP and receive-side UDP, so I will keep important routing duties on those ports.

The FriendlyELEC image remains the performance reference for the native 1GbE port and for 2.5GbE UDP transmit. My next target is comparing the stock and mainline device trees and the st_gmac DMA/queue/clock configuration.

What's the best OpenWrt SoC right now between the above if my main requirements are running Tailscale and SQM smoothly?

The OpenWrt router's WWAN interface (phy1-sta0) is configured as a DHCP client, and a computer accesses the internet via a wired connection to this OpenWrt router, which is acting as a Wi-Fi repeater.

Internet access works normally before sing-box starts (when it is not running). After starting sing-box, internet access is not working, but pinging OpenWrt.org succeeds (as shown in Figure 2).

Changing the computer's gateway from 192.168.1.1 to the OpenWrt router's management address (192.168.31.1), and setting the IP address to the same subnet as the OpenWrt router (192.168.31.90), still fails to establish a working internet connection (see Figure 3).

How should Passwall 2 be configured to allow a computer connected to the OpenWrt router to access the internet via a proxy server (with the VLESS node confirmed to be working)? What settings need to be changed on the "Other Settings" page, and are any modifications required for the DNS settings on the "Basic Settings" page?

flashed on the old open vrt at first the Internet did not work in any way the site open vrt then I was a moron threw some random sysapgrade chat gpt said it is necessary to solder something and I am afraid to do it because I am a handass plz help

I'm considering trying to flash an AP-515 to OpenWRT and seeing if it can use the built-in "IoT Radio" to run as a Zigbee Co-Ordinator & Zigbee over Ethernet (serial) device.

I've checked the flashing notes for AP-300's and it seems relatively straight forward but if anyones gone down this avenue and run into any gotcha's, let me know before I brick an AP? :D

Edi: I recognise AP-515 isn't supported, I'm not asking for it to be. I'm asking if anyone has tried.