[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?

[philjohn]

Versions of OpenWRT are tied to different Kernel versions, it's an entire distro, not just a layer above the Kernel.

So the QCA NSS drivers, for example, are kernel modules. The source is fully open and available, but trying to get it to build on the 4.14.x kernel used by OpenWRT is an exercise in futility unless you know the linux networking code inside out, as well as understand what the drivers are doing.

Work is ongoing and some progress is being made for the IPQ8064, and some mediatek SoC's not have full hardware offloading, but taking vendor provided code and massaging it into something acceptable either by OpenWRT (they are loathe to do as it's a huge job) or the upstream Kernel is a huge effort.

[knownunown]

The manufacturer usually modifies OpenWRT/QSDK to support their device. AFAIK, most of the time individual components from the device (CPU, Ethernet switch, wireless chip) are already supported in OpenWRT, it's just that the specific combo that the device contains just isn't there yet. This configuration is done with the device tree. On top of that, some manufacturers (Tp-Link, for example) don't use the standard OpenWRT sysupgrade image format, so the device rejects the new firmware that you try to flash.