[OpenWrt-Devel] OpenWrt Roadmap

[Fernando Frediani]

Hello.

I want to make a point about LEDE 17.01 branch.

I have seen in the forums and also testing myself the many people are
running LEDE 17.01 pretty stable and with good performance on older
devices. As we know there are 18.06 builds for some of these devices
as well but that have been reports of slowdowns overtime, instability,
higher latency or cases that was necessary to downgrade. On some
discussions people mentioned that this may be due to two main things:
a) newer kernel footprint b) newer LuCI of 18.06.

Even for some devices with 32MB of RAM and 8MB of flash it was
noticeable that 18.06 wasn't as stable as LEDE 17.01. There are also
successful tiny and stable builds for devices with 32MB of RAM and 4MB
of flash and which would be even harder if not impossible to keep the
bare minimal due to the bigger footprint of 18.06 for these cases. I
fully agree 4MB of flash is out of question for 18.06 and going
forward but there are several success cases for 17.01 tiny and custom
builds. And note that as just mentioned there are cases where even
with 8MB of flash 18.06 has not been an option.

We know that OpenWrt has been responsible for given a lot of extra
life to routers due to its newest features. Just to mention one great
example is full IPv6 support to routers where manufacturers stopped to
develop firmware upgrades.

Given that the point I want to put is to perhaps extend 17.01 life
beyond January 2019, at least to receive security patches.
I would normally agree with its retirement as normal part of OpenWrt
life-cycle but I fell that in this case we have a kind of special
situation where it is worth to keep it alive for a little while until
there is a lot of these usable hardware around.

Best regards
Fernando

On 05/11/2018 18:31, Hauke Mehrtens wrote:

Hi all,

We had a discussion about the future OpenWrt Roadmap in July here:
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/openwrt-adm/2018-July/000849.html

The outcome from my perspective is the following.

The next release would be done in January 2019 and named 19.01, this
release will probably have code freeze and get branched off in December
2018.
All targets included in 19.01 must use kernel 4.14, kernel 4.9 or older
will not be supported any more, kernel 4.19 will also not yet be
supported in 19.01.
The toolchain will use gcc 7.X, binutils 2.31.1 and musl 1.1.20, it
could be that we upgrade musl to 1.1.21, but gcc will stay on the 7.X
branch.
We already upgraded the wireless drivers to match what is shipped with
kernel 4.19.
OpenSSL should be upgraded to version 1.1.1 before the release.
The rest depends on what people are interested and merge into master
before the branch is created.

The following targets currently use kernel 4.9 and should be upgraded to
kernel 4.14 if they should be in the next release:
* ar7
* ixp4xx
* layerscape
Someone from NXP said they will provide some patches in November.
* brcm2708
I looked at the kernel patches from here:
https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux
* at91
Someone from Microchip already proposed some patches
* orion
* rb532


The next release after 19.01 would be planned for the summer or fall
2019, this release will be based on kernel 4.19, all targets have to be
upgrade to kernel 4.19 by then. This release will probably not contain
ar71xx any more, but only ath79 for these boards.


Support for kernel 4.19 will be added into OpenWrt master soon, but we
will not use it as a default kernel for any target before the 19.01
release is branched off.

Support for kernel 3.18 should be removed soon, we will move the targets
that depend on kernel 3.18 to the unmaintained target feed:
https://github.com/openwrt/targets
If you are interested in one of them, please bring them to kernel 4.14.


The LEDE 17.01 branch will be fully end of life in January 2019, I plan
a final release with the current git status and then it will not even
get fixes for severe security problems any more, currently it only gets
limited security support and all users are already encouraged to upgrade
to OpenWrt 18.06.
OpenWrt 18.06 will get security support till sometime in 2019, we
haven't decided about a date.

If you think we should do something differently please replay to this
mail, we can still change this.

Hauke

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