Announcing OpenWrt/MLPPP - multilink firmware for consumer routers - Caneris & Acanac

[Erik L]

> MLPPP support is clearly useful and I'm glad support for it is no
> longer limited to Tomato (I was previously unaware of Linux/MLPPP but
> it is (was?) limited to x86).
> 
IIRC, Linux/MLPPP is x86 only but I guess you should be able to cross-compile the source code for a different arch, much as we did when porting Linux/MLPPP to OpenWrt for MIPS, etc.

> Why did you fork?  I can imagine reasons but it would be good to know
> yours.
> 
We wanted to avoid a fork, but the prevailing factor for OpenWrt/MLPPP became ease of use. The product requires a non-default (for OpenWrt) kernel config and a MLPPP-related kernel patch, a non-default web interface (webif instead of luci) modified by us, plus all the userspace MLPPP code and scripts. While it's possible to compile the kernel patch into a replacement ppp kernel module and perhaps bring everything else down to a couple of .ipk, installing it like that over a stock OpenWrt would still not be trivial for non-technical end users. It would also require them running the correct version of OpenWrt - we based alpha 1 on 8.09.2 for various reasons. This is why we've chosen to provide pre-compiled binary images - the focus is on anyone being able to download the firmware, flash it, and config from the GUI. This doesn't preclude the technically-inclined from doing whatever they'd like to do. 

Another major reason was hardware; as I mentioned in the announcement, we're working on a complementary CPE (hardware). The end goal here is to sell pre-flashed and pre-configured units to our subscribers. Part of the hardware effort involves more kernel modification in the form of driver development for hardware currently not supported by OpenWrt. 

> Thanks for this work and thanks for announcing it here.
>
Thanks for taking an interest in this. For better or for worse, MLPPP for resi use wouldn't have seen such exposure or development if it weren't for Bell's recent tactics.

If anyone here is testing this out, feedback is most welcome.

Erik
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