[OpenWrt-Devel] Why OpenWrt sucks?

[valent.turkovic at gmail.com]

Hi all,
I see this or similar question of forums all the time and I have
answered it few times. I suggest we open a wiki page and contribute an
answer.

Here is how I usually reply to similar questions, please give your
comments in your replies:


Why it OpenWrt slower than stock firmware? I can help by shining a bit
of light onto this subject. I'm developing custom firwmares based on
OpenWrt but I'm not OpenWrt developer, still as I have few years of
experience with OpenWrt I can explain why sometimes performance sucks
or there are some issues and bugs.

OpenWrt has three main parts; linux kernel, software packages and
wireless drivers. OpenWrt developers work on all of them. Consider the
amount of code this is, and consider that all work is done by a
handful of OpenWrt developers. If you work in software industry you
know many people big companies hire to work on much smaller projects.
So be thankful it works as good as it does, it is actually a miracle
that it works as good as it does

Main issue is that wifi chip manufacturers don't offer open source
wifi drivers. If Atheros and Broadcom understood Open source as Intel
does then you would get absolutely top speed and reliability from
OpenWrt wifi drivers. You don't get top notch performance with OpenWrt
because Atheros and Broadcom are choosing not release quality open
source drivers.

Linux, BSDx and OpenWrt developers can only use other means to get
wifi devices to work, usually reverse engineering, and without support
from wifi chip companies it is not easy to support all features, get
awesome performance and stability.

This is a long way of saying, that if performance sucks on OpenWrt you
should blame Atheros and Broadcom for not giving you (OpenWrt
community) high quality open source drivers!
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