Hello,
I have been looking into this awesome router, which I am currently running DD-WRT on.

After doing some research, I have determined that there is no current compatibility with OpenWRT outside what Netgear has established.

Recent (In the last couple years) changes in the Linux Kernel has allowed the Alpine architecture to run on Linux. Currently DD-WRT is on Kernel 4.9 with this router.

My question is simple, as I have in the past built my own personal OpenWRT/LEDE builds, but have never ported anything, What would need to be done in order for this router to run OpenWRT mainline? Are there any plans on supporting it in the future?

Although I am not a mod or admin, I would like to request that any more discussion on this router be in here so that there is not numerous posts about this router (even though there are some, albeit simple "Does this router support OpenWRT" and things like that.

Thanks

[Disclaimer, I am not a LEDE/ OpenWrt developer and can't speak for them]

Take a look at a rather new architecture which needs only few patches to work, e.g. mvebu, you'd have to provide something similar for alpine and your r9000 (only concentrate on kernel 4.14). I don't think (very personal interpretation) there are any particular plans to support alpine, but if someone steps up and does to required work (realistically speaking this someone would be you at this point), there wouldn't be any reason to refuse merging it. If alpine really only needs very few patches (upstream kernel, binutils, gcc, musl), it should be easily maintainable, but the effort to get it working (providing factory images, sysupgrade support, GPIO definitions, etc.) won't be much smaller than for other targets.

What speaks against alpine, is that it doesn't appear to be very popular compared to similarly powerful SOCs (e.g. mvebu, ipq8065, mt7622, maybe the upcoming ipq8074), which would -currently- make it a single device target architecture, in other words a lot of effort for very little gain (covering only one pretty expensive device, which isn't really better than the already supported competition). But this only affects the chances to find someone else doing the work for you, but eventually you can find volunteers, if you throw the hardware at them.

(Last edited by slh on 2 Mar 2018, 21:00)

Just wanted to follow this discussion on the R9000 ... looks like I might need to return it, and get something less aggressive, more standard, less new.  I was sucked in my the marketing of it all, dual core 1.7Ghz ... sad part with my Ubiquity setup I don't really even need the radios in the X10.  Really I just wanted to buy a router that was going to last a while, any recommendations in this class?

https://forum.lede-project.org/t/whats- … evice/4477

If you don't need radios, look at the x86-based "network appliances."

Sorry getting back on this topic so late; schedule has been hell. Anyway, as I said I have built OpenWRT for personal use on already supported routers, but have no idea how to add a new architecture. So in our case the work that DD-WRT has done won't help at all getting the newer versions of OpenWRT to run on this (since the Netgear FW is a form of OpenWRT)