Ever since I found out my old Netgear R7800 didn’t have a functional IPv6 firewall, I’ve been riding happily on the OpenWrt train. Now I absolutely refuse to buy routers that I can’t flash with OpenWrt.
I’m a bit surprised OpenWrt is in the same list as the rest. It really is in a league of its own on a technical and functional level. OpenWrt is much closer to a typical server Linux OS. Yes you can use it as a dumb flash-it-and-go firmware replacement on supported hardware, but it can do so much more.
You can also run openwrt on x86 boxes and not just a random selection of embedded devices. That might feel silly, but you get the benefit of Linux’s more advanced bufferbloat mitigation and a nice clean and relatively easy to understand UI.
Not silly at all for multi-gig connections. I’m running it on Pi 4 which does well for a 1Gbps connection with SQM. Sometimes it’s cheaper to get old x86 hatdware to do the same. Or I’ve heard you could run it in a Docker container on a bigger machine.
Or I’ve heard you could run it in a Docker container on a bigger machine
You can definitely run it in a VM (which is how I handle it) but container support wouldn’t surprise me.
The “silly” part was more that if you have x86 you can use opnsense/pfsense but I’m with you in that SQM is a big draw as well as less risk of compatibility issues as my APs are also flashed with openwrt. And the BSDs were well behind on wireguard support when I first switched to x86, although they have since caught up now I believe.
Ever since I found out my old Netgear R7800 didn’t have a functional IPv6 firewall, I’ve been riding happily on the OpenWrt train. Now I absolutely refuse to buy routers that I can’t flash with OpenWrt.
I’m a bit surprised OpenWrt is in the same list as the rest. It really is in a league of its own on a technical and functional level. OpenWrt is much closer to a typical server Linux OS. Yes you can use it as a dumb flash-it-and-go firmware replacement on supported hardware, but it can do so much more.
You can also run openwrt on x86 boxes and not just a random selection of embedded devices. That might feel silly, but you get the benefit of Linux’s more advanced bufferbloat mitigation and a nice clean and relatively easy to understand UI.
Not silly at all for multi-gig connections. I’m running it on Pi 4 which does well for a 1Gbps connection with SQM. Sometimes it’s cheaper to get old x86 hatdware to do the same. Or I’ve heard you could run it in a Docker container on a bigger machine.
You can definitely run it in a VM (which is how I handle it) but container support wouldn’t surprise me.
The “silly” part was more that if you have x86 you can use opnsense/pfsense but I’m with you in that SQM is a big draw as well as less risk of compatibility issues as my APs are also flashed with openwrt. And the BSDs were well behind on wireguard support when I first switched to x86, although they have since caught up now I believe.
I was actually under the impression that DD-WRT was sort of on-par, but then again I’ve never tried it.