I am looking for a router, and OpenWRT came up. I was looking at their table of hardware and the ASUS RT-AC3100 seemed like a good option, as its cheap used, (~$40 USD) and supported by the latest OpenWRT version.
Thing is, its EOL, per Asus. Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
Is there a way to see or estimate when a router will no longer work on OpenWRT?
OpenWRT tends to support devices longer and better than the OEM, but it depends on the popularity of the chipset inside the router.
Many different routers by different companies are almost identical internally, because they use the same chipset. Eg the RT-AC3100 seems to be a bcm53xx variant, of which OpenWRT supports a few dozen products. Support will probably only be dropped when every single one of those devices goes EOL and several years pass (ie no people left contributing/maintaining it and the builds break somehow).
Router chipsets can be very long lived. Many new devices use decade old chipset designs. Some chipset families have almost identical chips released every few years with slightly different peripherals, clocks & pinouts; but are supported by the same kernel drivers.
(This is all much better than the world of mobile phone hardware support. Maybe it’s because of different market pressures? Not to mention you don’t have a monopoly that benefits from keeping the hardware fractured. Imagine if people could make a competitor to Android that works across most devices out there)
Rule of thumb for OpenWRT:
In general for consumer routers, Broadcom-based ones like the one posted require a lot of work and hacking to port and maintain. If they’re even working with OpenWRT at all it can be quite dicey and troblesome if you are not very lucky.
In comparison, Mediatek-based models tend to be better supported and smoother sailing.
I haven’t seen much of Qualcomm but I’d guess they fall somewhere closer to Broadcom.
So no, I don’t think it’s a good pick. If OP got it handed down for free it might be worth a shot but I would buy something else if the purpose is to run OpenWRT or any Linux or BSD on it.
Source: Installed OpenWRT on many different devices over the years, including one with the same chipset
Yes, OpenWRT lasts way longer. Main thing that ends support is hardware requirements. My old devices with only a few megabytes of memory got dropped eventually. Not because of the chipset, a modern OpenWRT would just not fit any longer. I rarely see other reasons for them to discontinue updates.
ha, some of them can even be upgraded to fit if you can do a little soldering
Sure. Sadly I don’t have the proper tools around to do that. And in my case I wasn’t too sad. These devices had 100mbps ethernet and a slow wifi standard. Now they’re on e-waste and I got an upgrade to Gigabit ethernet and 5GHz wifi 😆