[OpenWrt-Devel] Why OpenWrt sucks?

[Fernando Frediani]

Hello Valent,

I think, despite that fact you will get some opposition about some 
points you mentioned here, your email was a good email in my point of view.

First the the most controversial point about how much Atheros contribute 
to the open-source world and to Linux is seems to be that they do a much 
better job than many other vendors. They are probably far ahead than 
many of the known vendors.
However I wanted to leave a question about the performance which in some 
equipment with Atheros chips is in fact slower than with OEM firmware.
Take as example Ubiquiti. They are greatly engineered and as far as I 
know kind of base their firmware AirOS in OpenWRT, but I hear (I said 
heard) that their Atheroes drivers are not the same ones used by 
open-source community (so they have something else from Atheros) and 
they end up getting better speed.

The other points I wanted to mention is about the wiki. That is indeed a 
really good one you raised which could be better updated with more 
information in a more organized way.
In the forums there is plenty of rich information sometimes from the 
main people that is developing that specific architecture, but in many 
cases the same information, findings, issues, etc, take too long (when 
it does) to get to the wiki of that specific board.

I don't think OpenWrt sucks, and quite like it, but I do think it can 
get a lot better if people are engaged in more different and nice ways 
to contribute.

Fernando

On 09/03/2015 17:02, valent.turkovic at gmail.com wrote:
> 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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