OpenWrt vs Defense positions

[Peter Naulls]

On 5/2/23 07:26, Enrico Mioso wrote:
> On Mon, May 01, 2023 at 04:56:36PM -0400, Peter Naulls wrote:
>> On 5/1/23 16:42, Dave Taht wrote:
>>
>>>

> one of the constraints OpenWrt has been placed under, historically, is the need to fit in small flash memoris, so fitting some libraries and infrastructure maybe a little bit of a stretch here.
> Furthermore, OpenWrt has been tought to be a platform, not a "finished" solution: this is not meant bo be an "excluse", just to note that some particular problems, and their solutions, have not been integrated in the core.
> In some cases, like for ModemManager, the problems where related to size and complexity, I think.

Yes, although that's more historic; one of the reasons we did in fact go to NAND 
below is due to size constraints; and indeed with ModemManager.  It took us a 
long time to get ModemManager working how we liked it, since it's not a 100%
solution all by itself, and our needs are very specific.


> Another impression I have, is that the OpenWrt project is very important for many yet under-resourced.
> There are some important tasks that would help with the long-term maintenance (e.g. merging of the mtk_nand for mt7621 and the upstrema one, if at all possible), which require time and highly motivated person to carry on.

I was that person, but at this point, the upstream m7621 NAND driver works 
correctly, *except* when the MMC is also enabled. The mtk_nand driver is very 
old and I did get it to run correctly for reads under current kernel, but it
didn't seem to have any further value here, and many obvious faults - see my
discussion on this a few months back.  If there's specific work you know of
here, I'd be very interested.


> As for what will happen with OpenWrt when it will become used in some important places, I don't have an answer of course.
> Does anyone know how much contributions come from people working for companies in OpenWrt?

Who knows. I will say that OpenWrt has formed a large part of my career.  As 
measured by patches (which frankly, is something of a time-consuming hurdle), my
contributions are very very small, but all my OpenWrt work has been under 
companies.