Linux kernel 6.1 or 6.6 for OpenWrt 24.x release?

[Felix Baumann]

Am 5. Februar 2024 15:28:08 MEZ schrieb Rich Brown <richb.hanover at gmail.com>:
>
>To aid in the analysis, I copy/pasted the Table of Hardware into a spreadsheet to see what we would be losing. I started with https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_extended_all
>
>The resulting spreadsheet is at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j_Yv62tdYzvA4iU216W3B0XHswXv2U2LrxQ0QOB5-vE/edit?usp=sharing
>
>The tabs are:
>
>- Original Data - as copy/pasted from the Table of Hardware. Cells are protected to prevent inadvertent changes.
>	The rest of the spreadsheet is unprotected and you should feel free to modify it/make new tabs
>- Sorted by Curr Release - same data, but sorted by Current Release column (Column I)
>- 23.0x-only devices - removes the rows for 22.0x and earlier, and current release = blank
>- Changelog - changes from original data to produce current state
>
>Observations:
>
>- There are ~2200 devices listed in the ToH

There's a comparatively "huge" list of devices/images not present in the ToH. Not everyone adding device support bothered with adding it to the ToH.

>- There are ~880 devices that are only supported in 22.0x and earlier

Lots of those probably have a working 23.05.2 image. The list in the ToH wasn't checked manually. They just ran the usual script. We have no Wiki maintainer atm.
<https://forum.openwrt.org/t/help-wanted-wiki-site-admin-managers/175280>

There are 154 devices whose support was dropped with release 23 but(!) this was just due to the same earlier decision made to drop 4/32 devices. There were 154 devices we still built OpenWrt 22.03.x for that officially shouldn't have been supported anyways, dropping them was overdue. Noone bothered to do the work to drop them earlier.
<https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/12672> 

My advise:
Don't use the ToH as an estimate it is highly inaccurate.
Look at the download server and which images are present in the available releases.
Also: mvebu devices were dropped from OpenWrt 22 temporarily in releases after 22.03.3, I think. This was due to a bug in Kernel 5.10 regarding their switch that was reported after release. They returned with OpenWrt 23. The ToH might not reflect this correctly because tmomas script only touches devices who received the latest release. And mvebu didn't receive the latest 22 release before release of 23.

>- There are ~330 devices that have the empty string as the Supported Current Release
>- Virtually all the devices in the last two items (22.0x and earlier, and empty string) have been discontinued/unavailable from before 2020
>
>Can someone who knows more about our devices make a judgement whether we would lose an appreciable fraction of devices by switching to a kernel that might not fit/work? Thanks.
>
>Rich

I would do an estimate if I could. I don't think it's possible to do one without building images. Especially since OpenWrt will grow a bit as well till any release is done.
But I also wouldn't worry too much about this if I were you :)

Regards
Felix Baumann