[oneowl]

I was reading QSDK page [1] and it seems to me that they are doing something different from openwrt.

>The QCA Software Development Kit (QSDK) project allows users to build an OpenWrt based platform containing additional enhancements for Qualcomm Atheros chipsets that have not yet made it into the public OpenWrt repository.

I'm not aware of the project goals so I may be wrong.

[1] https://wiki.codeaurora.org/xwiki/bin/QSDK/

[philjohn]

Sort of - QSDK uses an old version of OpenWRT and a 3.x Linux Kernel to allow board partners (e.g. Netgear et al) to use their reference designs and spin up a working home router firmware quickly and easily.

An awful lot of devices these days ship with firmware that is actually OpenWRT (often v10-v15) based.

The actual NSS kernel modules have source available, and this is pulled into QSDK OpenWRT builds, but they've not had much luck getting stuff upstreamed[1] and getting them working on a recent 4.x kernel is non trivial.

This was also before the netfilter flow offloading framework, so the work is further compounded because they used their own offloading system.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/1/8/534

[workrockin]

> An awful lot of devices these days ship with firmware that is actually OpenWRT (often v10-v15) based.

This is a great explanation and it answers some of my questions as well. But I have one more. I have not worked with the devices that you mention but I was thinking that if they already have openwrt what is stopping an end user to simply update to the latest version?

Is there some kind of hardware incompatibility or maybe disabled updates?