OpenWRT 14.07 RC1 Supports Native IPv6, Procd Init System

An anonymous reader writes Release Candidate One of OpenWRT 14.07 "Barrier Breaker" is released. Big for this tiny embedded Linux distribution for routers in 14.07 is native IPv6 support and the procd init system integration. The native IPv6 support is with the RA and DHCPv6+PD client and server support plus other changes. Procd is OpenWRT's new preinit, init, hotplug, and event system. Perhaps not too exciting is support for upgrading on devices with NAND, and file system snapshot/restore so you can experiment without fear of leaving your network broken. There's also experimental support for the musl standard C library.

Comments

Something is broken

[CAPSLOCK2000]

I just tried it but something is not working.

# ping6 www.slashdot.org
unknown host

Something is horribly broken here.

Re:Something is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

It's on the list. Right after adding SSL and UNICODE support, and before fixing Beta.

Re:Something is broken

[xcyther]

Seriously. I've been wondering why (especially in this day and age) this site - for nerds, mind you - hasn't implemented SSL or IPv6. It boggles my mind.

Re:Something is broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently it isn't stuff that matters...

Re:Something is broken

[jones_supa]

Or an API that allows to implement third party apps. That would be an extremely tasty feature.

Re:Something is broken

[unixisc]

On SSL, they now have the choice of SSL or LibreSSL. If they wait long enough, they'll also have LibreUnicode and LibreIPv6 to choose from as well

Re:Something is broken

[lister king of smeg]

Apparently it isn't stuff that matters...

because unfortunately our dice overlords don't view slashdot itself as stuff that matters...

Re:Something is broken

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

To be fair, It didn't get prioritized when Taco/Sourceforge/geeknet was in charge.

The site is a victum of its success and its libertarian philosophy. The trolls killed slashdot.

Re:Something is broken

[tlhIngan]

It's on the list. Right after adding SSL and UNICODE support, and before fixing Beta.

SSL is supported. Subscribers only feature though.

Unicode is also supported. It does actually work, just that the whitelist of allowable Unicode codepoints is small. Adding in extra codepoints is on an as-needed basis. You're not likely to see those new emoji anytime soon.

Re:Something is broken

[hobarrera]

Just be thankful that today's headline doesn't have typos in it!

Something is broken

[slashdice]

That's a feature, not a bug.

Will it run on my WRT54G?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just picked it up at a garage sale!

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[Albanach]

Presumably people need to know version number. I think one of the big problems with the original wrt54g is network throughput. With cable services regularly hitting 50Mbps+ mine can't really cope - even on the wired connections.

So, a question for those of you running openWRT or similar, which not too expensive router would you recommend to replace my decade old wrt54G?

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[Anonymous Coward]

TP-Link routers are cheap and well supported by OpenWRT. At the low end, the TL-WR841N can easily route 50Mbps WAN to LAN and costs just $20.

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[willoughby]

Mine is a TPLINK WDR3600. Simultaneous dual-band, gigabit everything, 2 USB ports, and even a real power button (!). It's been running "ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT (12.09, r36088) " for a little more than a year and it's great.

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[SlashdotOgre]

I've been very satisfied with my Netgear WNDR3700 (gigabit, dual band, USB, etc.) to the point where I'll almost certainly get a Netgear when I replace next year (to move to AC). I have been running various svn checkouts of OpenWRT over the last 3+ years and haven't had many problems (and those I did encounter would have been avoided if I stuck to the formal releases).

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[klapaucjusz]

I don't recommend the WRT54G(L) for OpenWRT hacking -- it's a little short on RAM and seriously short on flash. There's a lot of much nicer routers available, with more RAM, more flash, 802.11n and gigabit Ethernet. Somebody else in this thread mentioned the WNDR3700v2, which I'm very happy with (but check the board revision -- the v1 doesn't work well). The successor is the WNDR3800, which is the same board with more RAM.

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[billstewart]

It's 2.4GHz only, but I guess I could hang it next to my Linksys router, which can do 2.4 or 5 but not both at once, and which doesn't do IPv6 :-)

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[Lothsahn]

I run Toastman's build of Tomato on RT-N66Us. I have 6 of them in various environments, from 6 months to 2 years deployed, and not a single lockup in prod operation. I achieve rates of 150Mb/s wired and 30-50Mb/s wireless. While speeds are not great, I'm mainly after features, stability, and the bandwidth monitor--and these are plenty faster than my ISP. These are dual-band as well, which is useful as one of the environments I'm in has a completely saturated 2.4 GHZ spectrum.

I have had stability problems in Toastman Tomato when I enable IPv6, but I expect that's either me doing something wrong, or a firmware issue, not a hardware issue.

The ASUS routers also have a CFE (bios, kinda) which allows reflashing, which means they're almost impossible to brick. Highly recommend.

The RT-AC66U is much faster than the RT-N66U, but I haven't had much experience with it. Shibby Tomato does support it now.

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[antdude]

How about WRT54GL? :P

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[Marillion]

I'm running the same hardware. It's solid. Love it.

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[richlv]

for how long do you have it ? is it constantly on ?
my asus wl500gp is having a recurring capacitor problem and i feel ready to replace it with something nice and perfectly supported by openwrt.

what are the biggest problems you have faced with that device ?

Re:Will it run on my WRT54G?

[Eythian]

Thanks, just ordered one to replace my aging WRT54GL.

Why not systemd?

[Gothmolly]

It's all modern and D-Bussy and neckbeardy. Why not use systemd since init is old school?

Re:Why not systemd?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which part of embedded, resource-constrained system did you not understand? Also, just because something is old doesn't mean it sucks. Just because something is new doesn't mean it is wonderful. The opposite is true, too, of course. ... but people have reasons for not liking systemd. A big one of them is the shitty attitude of the lead developer when it comes to fixing bugs and interacting with people. Some people are mean to others when those others deserve it for screwing things up royally. Some people are just assholes to others whether they do anything wrong or not - some people are assholes whenever anybody dares to criticize their work in any way whatsoever. The lead developer of systemd isn't one who yells at people when they deserve it - he's one of the ones that's an asshole to everybody. Especially those that dare to criticize His Holiness.

That in and of itself is a good reason to not use systemd.

Re:Why not systemd?

[Anonymous Coward]

True. But the systemd fanboys will mark it Troll.

Re:Why not systemd?

[marcello_dl]

Ok so original poster trolled tongue in cheek, grandparent replied seriously, you predict he'd be modded down and he is. Congrats, but you should have wooshed him too.

Re:Why not systemd?

[lister king of smeg]

Personally I wish its death would be fast and painful. that way i don't have to deal with it as long.

Re:Why not systemd?

[blackiner]

I am a pretty big fan of systemd myself, but it is not feasible on a lot of these devices for space reasons alone:

[kel@octogon ~]$ ls -l /lib/systemd/systemd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1317648 Jul 8 08:13 /lib/systemd/systemd

And that is just the systemd binary, not including all of it's helper executables. The original WRT54G only had 4MB of flash on it, so systemd alone would take up more than 1/4 of the space. But you also need to get the kernel and a slew of userspace executables/libraries on there, and the 2.4 kernel just barely fit on the original WRT54G. The 2.6 kernel, and thus ipv6 support, was out of the question. I imagine systemd and a 2.6 based kernel would cut pretty heavily into the flash memory for even the newest of routers and be fairly unfeasible. If you run your routing off an actual PC though, it is fine.

Re:Why not systemd?

[the_humeister]

Someone mod the parent post up. Linux 2.6 is bigger than Linux 2.4. systemd is also much larger than init.

From my router:

root@Linksys E1200 v1:/sbin# ls -Fsl init
        12 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12635 May 27 2013 init*

12KB for init vs. 1.3MB for systemd. systemd privides no tangible benefit over init for a router (or at least to justify its size increase).

procd?

[Anonymous Coward]

possible sane systemd replacement in debian and others.

Or perhaps desktop linux keeps bloating up, and we see OpenWRT desktop that replaces Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora.

Will it run on my WRT54G?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe here: http://downloads.openwrt.org/barrier_breaker/14.07-rc1/brcm47xx/legacy/

Re: Apropos IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

Try https://tunnelbroker.net/ from HE, the best tunnel broker I've used.

Why not systemd?

[Anonymous Coward]

because systemd is not and init system. It's and everything system.

Look at the comparison with procd in the openwrt to get an idea of the unbounded nature of systemd.

systemd is not suitable for and embedded system because it's too fat.
systemd is not suitable for an non-embedded system, because the performance gains over the lighter alternatives are insignificant on a desktop system.

Re:procd?

[marcello_dl]

Well alpinelinux is already a bit on that route.

Does it (reliably) support 5GHz or 802.11ac yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

The big question... is there any remotely-mainstream 802.11ac router for which OpenWRT actually has non-broken 5GHz, beamforming, or any other advanced wi-fi feature? Or are we basically still stuck having to buy two routers... an open one running OpenWRT for routing (and other embedded-level networking tasks), and a proprietary one running stock firmware for non-dysfunctional 802.11ac? I want to use OpenWRT. Really, I do. But every time I'm in a mood to try it, I look at the litany of horrors in the "known bugs" list (or complaints on various forums that usually have "minor" bugs like "5GHz doesn't work" or "wifi randomly quits working after a day or two".

Re:procd?

[drinkypoo]

possible sane systemd replacement in debian and others.

Oh yeah, procd is fantastic! As per TFA,

One thing that procd does much better then â¦

It boils down to the fact that the current ⦠are rather constrained and inflexible:

        â¦
        â¦
        â¦

procd will be able to ⦠- and of course all that without adding unnecessary bloat. AFAIK there are no alternatives to procd.

I mean, how can you argue with logic like that!?

Re:Does it (reliably) support 5GHz or 802.11ac yet

[klapaucjusz]

complaints on various forums that usually have "minor" bugs like "5GHz doesn't work" or "wifi randomly quits working after a day or two"

Just to prevent people from getting the wrong idea -- OpenWRT is fully functional and rock solid on a lot of 802.11n hardware (including 40MHz support). I haven't played with 802.11ac yet.

Re:We've had this for years.

[klapaucjusz]

I have been running native ipv6 and whatever other modern stuff on my ASUS RT-N16 via TomatoUSB for many years. So uh... What took you dorks so long?

OpenWRT has had support for native IPv6 for as long as anyone can remember. However, the support wasn't native, in the sense that it required some knowledge to configure properly.

With the current trunk (and this snapshot), you can configure things like DHCPv6 prefix delegation, DHCPv6 relaying, proxy-ND and so on over the web interface -- and it just works. (Famous last words.)

Re:Does it (reliably) support 5GHz or 802.11ac yet

[blackiner]

I've been eying this myself, since I would like to upgrade my card to 802.11ac at some point as well. There are two pieces to the puzzle, user space support, and kernel driver support. AFAIK, both are supported but you need fairly new software. The ath10k driver supposedly supports 802.11ac and was included in linux 3.11. I believe newer versions of hostapd support 802.11ac but can't find any specifics about what version it was included in, but the newer the version, the better (so, preferably 2.2). And of course you will need to find a wireless card that uses the ath10k driver. I run my router off a normal PC and have a distro with recent software so this is easy to do, but I have no idea what versions OpenWRT supports.

According to this everything should work: http://wireless.kernel.org/en/...
But according to this there are mixed results: https://forum.openwrt.org/view...

Re:"Not that exciting"

[AvitarX]

Also, snapshot is more exciting I'd think.

Why do we need IPv6 tunnel brokers?

[billstewart]

Because most ISPs still haven't gotten their act together with IPv6, and many of the ones that have would rather outsource the tunnel function rather than run it themselves. And one of the biggest hurdles toward doing IPv6 (besides getting decent performance out of the bigger network equipment) is replacing all the cable modems / DSL routers / etc. that don't support it adequately.

Not a flame war: dd-wrt vs openWRT

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I pushed my router to dd-wrt a while ago. At the time, I liked the UI on dd-wrt better than openWRT. I also noticed some issues on my specific hardware for OpenWRT. How do they stack up?

Re:Not a flame war: dd-wrt vs openWRT

[klapaucjusz]

I pushed my router to dd-wrt a while ago. At the time, I liked the UI on dd-wrt better than openWRT. I also noticed some issues on my specific hardware for OpenWRT. How do they stack up?

They're very different beasts.

DD-WRT is a single, monolithic image, similar to a vendor firmware but with more features. What is available tends to be well integrated into the GUI, but if a feature is not available, you're pretty much out of luck (unless you're willing to install software by hand).

OpenWRT, on the other hand, is a package based system: there's a base system and an extensive set of optional packages that you may install. It used to be the case that the OpenWRT GUI was not very good, but it has improved a lot in recent years, and I now find it fairly usable. Of course, not all packages are well integrated with the GUI.

I'd recommend going with OpenWRT. The base system should be reasonably easy to understand, and you'll be able to easily install extra software when you find that you have unusual needs.

Re:Does it (reliably) support 5GHz or 802.11ac yet

[makomk]

Unfortunately, some common routers contain a buggy early revision of the QCA9880 802.11ac chip that's not supported by ath10k and never will be.

Works great on a TP-Link WDR3600

[AbrasiveCat]

I have had a TP-Link WDR3600 for about 7 months. About 4 months ago I decided I wanted to start doing ipv6 and the TP-Link software didn't work with Comcast for ipv6. I found a pre-release of Barrier Breaker loaded it up, rebooted and it all worked. I guess it is time to upgrade to the release candidate. There were some issues with the second radio and supporting 802.11an but a few minutes searching on line and I had fix for that too.

Re:procd?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? No systemd integration?

Excellent!

Re:We've had this for years.

[klapaucjusz]

Yeah, what I'm saying is we have been able to do exactly that (web configuration) with the various TomatoUSB modded firmwares for years along with a bunch of other stuff (VPN, etc).

Proxy-ND? Stateful DHCPv6? Somehow I doubt it.

Maybe interesting

[jd]

How does the native support look on the official IPv6 compliance tests at TAHI?

Not everyone wants DHCP at home, when router advertisements and automatic addressing are as good or better. How does this look?

Does the router support Mobile IP?

Are there any disabled kernel options relating to the protocol?

How does it fare on IPv6 NAT?

DNSSEC Validation

[smutt]

I think it's also worth mentioning that this release supports DNSSEC validation. That's a bigger deal than the IPv6 support in my book, especially since it already supported IPv6 it just required knowledge to configure.

WNDR3400v3 support?

[bjoswald]

Someone? Anyone? Bueller?