| From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@gmail.com> | I'm a bit suspicious that OpenWRT isn't sufficiently supported by "staffing" | (of whatever sort) to keep up with the normal flow of new router hardware | (there's naturally going to be new stuff, as all the vendors need to sell | something new next year). My impression is that: - reverse engineering is slower than new gadgets get adopted. Broadcom is very bad for open source. Atheros has been much better (at least until it was bought by Qualcomm). - it appears that support for NAND flash is not mainstreamed in OpenWRT. Yet that seems to be the future direction of hardware. (technical sketch: ordinary old flash can be written a word at a time, kind of like RAM (but more slowly). NAND can only be zeroed a large block at a time. And NAND flash is much shorter-lived. (But it is cheaper and more dense.) So you need layer of software to do wear-leveling and to create an abstraction that kind of looks like a disk. There are several competing systems to do that. UBI is one that is being adopted for some OpenWRT projects.) - lots of OpenWRT work is itch-scratching. It often involves git commits but not wiki updates. So if you care about a device, google for it + openwrt. There are often postings about work in progress, sometimes even completed. - turn it around: buy hardware that is known to be good for OpenWRT. Unfortunately, buying stuff that does not support the latest standards is a bit discouraging. The CeroWRT folks (downstream from OpenWRT, and very interesting) only support the NetGear WNDR3700v2 and equivallent -- no support for 802.11ac. The TP-Link Archer C7 v2 looks good, cheap, and might be supported. Beware: the v1's wireless will never be supported; the C8 is not as good, more expensive, and isn't supported (it has the same Broadcom chip as is in my Netgear R6300v2). <http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wdr7500> <http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/32498-tp-link-archer-c7-v2-reviewed> So why did I buy the Broadcom-based Netgear R6300v2? I was bargain hunting and in a hurry. I read the OpenWRT thread on the Netgear R6300v2 and didn't read to the end; it looked as if support had just appeared. And the raw hardware of the Netgear looked much better than the TP-Link: 8 times as much flash, lots more ram, much faster processor, USB3. I failed to notice that the actual wireless performance wasn't quite as good. The final hook was that I was buying a somewhat cheaper model than an R6300v2 and upgrading it by flashing. I thought I was getting away with something. I had actually started with a Future Shop / Best Buy bargain on the TP-Link C7 (for a v2, but that wasn't in the specs.) but they ran out of stock. The FS/BB blow-out might be a sign that the c7 is being replaced by the inferior c8. Get'em while you can.