
Introducing the LEDE project – A reboot of the OpenWrt community - ycmbntrthrwaway
https://www.lede-project.org/
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ausjke
A long time openwrt user here. What puzzles me the most is that, those who are
forking openwrt are the the majority group of core developers for openwrt, so
I don't know why they are leaving the project they're in control in the first
place. It seems a few core developers left behind are also in shock, nobody
knows why, and there is no dispute in the community that led to the split
either, truly a mystery.

~~~
dman
Maybe this is the first step towards launching a commercial offering?

~~~
mcbridematt
Given that OpenWRT is the reference distribution of choice for networking
chipsets these days, the reference goals do seem to be focused on making it
better for that.

The last couple of OpenWRT releases have moved fast, in the future OpenWRT
could move closer to the cutting edge without the pressure of users who want
long term stability?

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ge0rg
It is a real pity that the lack of developers is compensated by splitting
developer focus on two different forks. If the reasons stated are true, let's
hope it works out and strengthens embedded Linux, maybe even leading to a
reunion like egcs/gcc.

~~~
embeem
This announcement comes as a surprise to all the other developers, myself
included.

\- mbm (openwrt founder)

~~~
JeremyNT
OpenWRT is an impressive project and I've really enjoyed using it over the
years.

It's always disappointing to see a project you use and rely upon face this
kind of challenge. With technical forks, you can usually at least appreciate
the motivations, but with political forks it can be difficult to understand
what or how things will be improved (especially for users who only see events
from the outside).

Best of luck to you and the rest of the team in resolving whatever issues are
at play here.

------
revelation
They have a point, maintaining something based on OpenWRT is extremely painful
if you are not very in tune with the development.

I remember one instance where they just switched the entire package feed stuff
around and didn't bother porting all old packages over. Or when core packages
move around willy-nilly.

Another instance was when they changed over to a new freaking libc (musl).
That's the kind of thing for major releases, and the fallout was that stuff
like hwclock suddenly segfaulted.

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symlinkk
oh boy more fragmentation! I wish the devs behind OpenWrt, dd-wrt, and LEDE
would just work together for god's sake. OpenWrt is far from complete. the
documentation alone is terrible.

~~~
embeem
Agreed, but the irony in that statement is that the OpenWrt developers who
started LEDE are also DD-WRT developers.

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patrickg_zill
Concerning those who complain about the fork - Debian has spawned Ubuntu and
many other distros.

RedHat has spawned CentOS and Scientific Linux.

Is anyone arguing that this has destroyed Linux?

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Animats
Now if they could just get rid of Linux underneath and use something with
better security. L4, maybe. After all, this is for embedded devices which
basically run one program.

~~~
DiabloD3
I don't know why parent is being downvoted. Linux probably isn't the best OS
for this, a microkernel OS or something based on BSD seems to be far saner,
especially since we _don 't_ need weird hardware support, all home routers use
the same three or four families of MIPS and ARM SoCs.

~~~
wtallis
Home routers come with one of three instruction set families (MIPS, ARM,
PowerPC) with CPUs or SoCs from at least six major manufacturers (Broadcom,
Qualcomm-Atheros, Ralink/MediaTek, Marvell, Freescale/NXP, Realtek) and WiFi
interfaces from any of them except Freescale but plus Quantenna. And there are
multiple generations of hardware in the market at any one time. That adds up
to a hardware ecosystem that is vastly more diverse than PCs; this is in no
way a narrow scope of problem. And I'm ignoring all the devices that also have
a cable, DSL, or cellular modem.

The boundaries of what tasks are handled by the CPU vs by dedicated offloads
on the SoC vs by the NIC (which usually has software of its own) differs with
every manufacturer and every hardware generation. The job we want our routers
to do is a moving target as the industry continues to develop new routing and
configuration protocols (eg. Homenet) and new QoS techniques and new WiFi rate
control techniques that need to be incorporated into the software running on
the CPU and/or NIC. The hardware is usually weak enough that the products can
only get the job done by prioritizing performance over expensive security
measures.

I could get behind the idea of a line-rate dedicated firewall+NAT with
formally specified behavior. But any attempt to enumerate the core
functionality of a modern wireless router will leave you with a job that is
far larger than any successful formally specified/verified software project.

Running atop Linux is the only option that doesn't leave you stranded with a
'90s-era feature set and a cripplingly small base of supported hardware, and
the userspace stuff is the low-hanging fruit for securing anyway.

~~~
duaneb
What about {net|free|open}BSD?

~~~
wtallis
Their hardware support is not as good as Linux, especially for WiFi and for
embedded SoCs. Their network stacks are lacking in more advanced features like
QoS that's not from the '90s (AQM, FQ, traffic shaping that accounts for the
overhead your DSL or cable modem adds) and I'm not aware of any efforts to
eliminate bufferbloat from NIC drivers the way BQL has for most Linux Ethernet
drivers. I'm not sure how Linux compares against the BSDs for dumb packet
forwarding and NAT performance, but for real-world performance the better QoS
makes it no contest.

Linux is what the chipset manufacturers target, it's what the router
manufacturers ship, it's what most of the academics seem to turn to when
they're not using a network simulator, and Linux seems to have the most active
networking developers. The only compelling argument for BSDs is that pf.conf
is more approachable than the Linux tools, but BSD advocates usually don't
mention that it's because pf does a lot less than tc and the other Linux
tools.

~~~
antxxxx
FreeBSD has QoS available via PF and ALTQ. As for performance, Netflix chose
FreeBSD for their CDN for the better network performance over linux. I do take
your point about hardware support on consumer routers though - most of these
are based on linux so its relatively easy to get linux based *wrt installed on
them

~~~
wtallis
Stop thinking like QoS has a singular meaning. ALTQ provides the
aforementioned '90s-era inferior QoS techniques, and it isn't even available
on FreeBSD without recompiling the kernel. The dummynet module is a little
more modern, and in February patches appeared implementing the CoDel and FQ-
CoDel AQMs that Linux has had for four years.

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DominikD
It's interesting to compare contributors from both LEDE[1] and OpenWRT[2]
sites. Most of the folks involved in LEDE seem to be from Germany. With
OpenWRT devs mostly from DE to begin with, this fork may end up as something
interesting. Hope it's not another libav/ffmpeg snafu.

[1] [https://www.lede-project.org/about.html](https://www.lede-
project.org/about.html) [2]
[https://dev.openwrt.org/wiki/people](https://dev.openwrt.org/wiki/people)

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patrickg_zill
What I can tell you, is that I found it very difficult to find what the
situation was on the Netgear router that I wanted to work with.

A series of well-designed pages that would help me find the latest info, with
notes of workarounds or "no it won't work" would have saved me a lot of
Googling to find posts, then having to look at the date of each post to work
out the chronology; and would go a long way to helping with adoption.

I was very pleased with OpenWRT even 5-6 years ago! I am sure that things are
better now.

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Hydraulix989
I really don't understand why there needs to be a newly forked router firmware
project every few years. Back in my day, we used DD-WRT, and it worked.

~~~
the-dude
They went over to the dark side.

~~~
randomchars
How so?

~~~
the-dude
Tried to go commercial, relicensing a community effort. Not sure if this is
what sparked OpenWRT into existence.

~~~
gear54rus
Is this it? [http://www.wi-
fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/3816236/The-D...](http://www.wi-
fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/3816236/The-DD-WRT-Controversy.htm)

~~~
the-dude
yes.

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pmorici
Interesting. I've always found OpenWRT a lot easier to use for embedded
development than alternatives like OpenEmbedded even if I didn't care about
the Wireless or Router focus of the project.

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ksec
Slightly Offtopic, are there anything similar based on FreeBSD / BSD?

~~~
nissimk
There are several listed here, but most of them only work on x86, not consumer
routers.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_router_and_firewall_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_router_and_firewall_distributions)

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chris_wot
What are the benefits of using procd? And are you going to fork that also?

What's the scope of this project - really very interested...

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bluesign
"AGREED: 4/6 attendees agree to create and agenda and finding a date on the
mailing list (jow_laptop, 13:05:51)" [1]

First major disagreement :)

[1] [http://meetings.lede-project.org/lede-adm/2016/lede-
adm.2016...](http://meetings.lede-project.org/lede-adm/2016/lede-
adm.2016-03-30-11.05.html)

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Zekio
More of this type of projects is good, gives consumers/developers more
choices.

~~~
pferde
Not always. If a fork is made because some group wants to move in a different
direction code-wise, it's good, because it gives users more choice. However,
if the fork is made because of administrative reasons (as it seems to be the
case here), then often all it does is muddy the waters and create confusion.
We'll see how this one plays out.

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lindadarnell
I don't like it

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grandalf
While I'm excited about OpenWrt, why wouldn't the ecosystem move to Raspberry
Pi at this point, considering that a Pi and multiple wireless NICs can be
purchased for much less than a typical access point?

~~~
grandalf
My comment is getting lots of downvotes. I'd argue:

\- All the routers (buffalo, linksys) I've installed OpenWRT on have ended up
being fairly unstable and have required reboots. The only consumer grade wifi
router I've tried that seems stable is the Apple Airport Extreme.

\- Most home users never come close to maxing out the throughput a pi can
offer.

\- If not a pi, perhaps another open hardware device -- seems like one could
be sold for under $50 with nic support that addresses all the max USB
bandwidth concerns (it may already exist).

\- All the complexity of installing on random wifi router hardware (version
maintenance, minimal storage space, etc.) seems prohibitive compared to the
simplicity of a pi, risk of bricking the router, etc.

~~~
easp
"Most home users" are never going to install OpenWRT on anything, RPi, or
otherwise. Of those that do, it seems likely that they will max out the
throughput of a RPi, especially now that >100Mbps internet is common place is
some countries, and is becoming increasingly available in others (like the
US).

There are some RPi like boards with a single GigE, but they suffer from having
smaller developer communities, and still come up short on IO when compared to
a networking platform, which will typically have 1-2GigE lanes to the SoC,
integrated 2 or 3 stream 2.4 GHz WiFi and a 1-2x miniPCIe interfaces.

Right now, probably the cheapest most capable router is the Ubiqti EdgeRouterX
for $50 (no wifi though). It has a 2 core/4 thread MIPS CPU that can do ~1Gbps
NAT/ROuting with hardware offloads and ~500Mbps just using the CPU and DMA
hardware.

~~~
grandalf
> It has a 2 core/4 thread MIPS CPU that can do ~1Gbps NAT/ROuting with
> hardware offloads and ~500Mbps just using the CPU and DMA hardware.

Wow! What do you think is the best one that _does_ do wifi?

