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 _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
