[OpenWrt-Devel] OpenWrt 20.X release plans

[Michal Cieslakiewicz]

Hi!

Speaking as a small part-time contributor of some Netgear WN(D)R routers
code, please reconsider if jumping over 4.19 straight to 5.4 is not a
too big leap. I'm sure kernel devs here knows better than me how many
OpenWrt drivers, quirks and enhancements can be ported without too much
effort from 4.14 to 5.4 that will really benefit from newer 5.x code,
but here are my 5 cents.

I was able to port ar934x-nand code from ar71xx 4.4 kernels to ath79 &
device-tree 4.19 without going too deep into low-level NAND operations
thanks to only minor changes in kernel code. 5.4 apparently deprecates
some functions in that area providing 'legacy' knobs for
who-knows-how-long. If this particular flash driver won't work with 5.4
at the time of 20.x, routers using it (like WNDR4300 and
other AR9344-based) effectively will not have any stable OpenWrt
release supporting it even though they were in master since the end of
2019.

IMHO OpenWrt should have an one final, rock-stable release based on
latest 4.x LTS kernel (4.19 that is) with ath79 replacing ar71xx
whenever possible.

Apologies for being so Atheros-centric :-)

Cheers
Michal

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