openwrt: what routers just plain ***work***?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 05:01:36AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   i'm currently waxing philosophical on the openwrt users mailing
> list, bitching about the fact that there's no simple list of
> commercially available routers that just plain *work* with a 2.6-based
> build of openwrt.  and by "work," i mean out of the box, install
> openwrt and wireless magically comes up and works properly and you're
> off to the races.
> 
>   there always appear to be some caveats:
> 
>   * a linksys wrt54gl is great, as long as you run a 2.4 kernel to
>     get wireless
> 
>   * another router might have working wireless but it's not stable,
>     which i interpret as "not working".
> 
>   * another router will work fine as long as you replace the broadcom
>     wireless card with an atheros

Very rare to do these days do to integrated single chip designs.

>   * the router comes with USB ports, but USB support isn't quite there
> 
> and so on, and so on.  which inspires a simple question -- can anyone
> here point to an off-the-shelf router on which you can install openwrt
> that just ***works***?  ideally, i'd like:
> 
>   * a router that takes the latest 2.6 version of openwrt -- i have no
>     interest in regressing to 2.4 to get working wireless, as you need
>     to do on the wrt54gl
> 
>   * has at least one USB 2.0 port that works
> 
> there's supposed to be a new release -- 8.09.1 -- out tomorrow and
> that might solve a bunch of issues but has anyone on this list found a
> router that works?  thanks.

Given the majority of the routers made commercially these days use
broadcom chips, and these days to save cost they are usually single chip,
which means cpu, wireless, switch, etc all in one chip.  Unfortunately
those broadcom wifi designs have no open specs (damn broadcom) and hence
only work with the binary driver which so far exists only for 2.4 kernels
it seems.

So as a result it would be very hard to find hardware that would work
with 2.6 kernels since it would involve a company choosing to use a more
expensive design with multiple chips.  Who is going to do that?

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists