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?
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Just because Asus has EoL’d doesn’t mean openwrt will drop support. In fact, you can get these routers for cheap now and breathe new life into them.
With openwrt your router will outlive you. You might have to take it out with a shotgun. I have a 20-year-old dsl router that the isp gave us for free and it will not die.
There are probably people reading this who are younger than this router, and don’t remember DSL… and yet this beast can absolutely run openwrt 23.xx.
https://openwrt.org/toh/actiontec/gt784wnv
I say “can” because I retired mine to the box a few years ago, running 19.xx and working like new. (Just that 100Mbps is too slow.)
Man it doesn’t even feel like that long ago that my mind was blown by 100mbps. Also blown over how I just made a bunch of cat5 (not e) patches for my brother’s brother printer and other non gigabit devices and he mixed it up with the 6a and connected the computer and it seemed to actually work at 2.5gbit. Still put the proper one in though as I can’t trust that and wpnt always be around to babysit it.
Thing is, its EOL, per Asus. Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
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 😆
Check out GL.iNet products. They’re all based on OpenWrt with a more beginner-friendly GUI on top. (LuCi can be installed via a few clicks.) And very affordable. Some can be flashed to vanilla OpenWrt as well.
GL.Inet products that use Mediatek chipsets are great since you can usually flash standard OpenWRT on them. I would avoid routers with different chipsets since they are unlikely to get proper support.
(Though I can’t say that my MT-6000 is cheap, but it is an extremely capable router. That is top of the line though, they have cheaper stuff.)
Looking at you Flint 3 DOWNGRADE!!!
This. I looked at a bunch of options and these are the best for OpenWrt and are very reasonably priced. Mine did torrenting, VPN, and a few other small services before I got my proper served up and running and now it is less loaded and more relaxed without that workload. Absolutely awesome, very high quality for low price, and it comes with a very slightly modified OpenWrt firmware which is unlocked by default.
I used OpenWRT and Tomato and a bunch of other forks. I settled on pfsense on a mini PC x86 box because of the community support and great YouTube tutorials.
Maybe the OpenWRT One?
I’ve considered this but only 1 Ethernet port requires a switch, so I’m not really sure
Unmanaged switches are cheap and useful. Managed are better but not everyone has the need for them
OpenWrt usually supports a device until it’s infeasible or has no maintainers I believe. Beware of small flash!
Personally I recommend getting either a MediaTek Filogic device or one of those x86 boxes. They have the best FOSS support right now and having ARM A53 cores means you can do QoS at fairly good speed. Don’t expect good Wi-Fi if you went with devboards like OpenWrt One.
Looking up the router, it was allegedly produced in 2024, according to the OpenWRT wiki. Barring any outliers, OpenWRT generally only sunsets hardware when a new version has higher hardware requirements than is provided by a device. The supported devices page lists out the hard requirements as well as recommendations. Currently 8 MiB flash storage is the minimum, with 16+ MiB recommended (for additional functions, user addons, etc.). 64 MiB is the minimum RAM target, with 128+ MiB recommended. According to the router’s wiki page, your chosen router exceeds both recommended requirements. Overall, the router should be suitable for a good while not barring any severe hardware or bootloader-level exploitable vulnerabilities are discovered with the device. There is no explicit date of when your router will no longer be supported, but you can check the history of the supported devices page to get the general trend of when OpenWRT bumps up the minimum requirements. For instance, it was just 4/8+ MiB flash storage and 32/64+ MiB RAM in early 2017.
Depending on what you want to do with the router, getting something with more RAM and a stronger CPU could be beneficial for various tasks (e.g. adblock-fast, cake sqm, etc.). Definitely do research on what you want your router to do though before choosing to go with higher specs or not.
FWIW I bought an N100 mini pc with 2 nics for ~100eur and use it as an openwrt router. It’s so easy and simple IDK why more people don’t recommend it.
I mean, the mini PCs don’t come with a managed switch, and often without good wireless connectivity that most home routers will come equipped with. So in total with Wi-Fi APs and a decent switch, definitely more than €100 in total.
Also unrelated, but if you’re running a x86 system with gigabytes of RAM, why not run Opnsense at that point?
Also unrelated, but if you’re running a x86 system with gigabytes of RAM, why not run Opnsense at that point?
I believe it’s gotten better but historically *BSD had poor SQM support (bufferbloat mitigation), which is particularly useful on slower, asymmetric connections and where low, consistent latency is paramount.
It was also a bit of a laggard on Wireguard support, although that’s long since been fixed. So mainly you might prefer OpenWRT if you want the Linux kernel which tends to get features more quickly. Also because it’s so low on resource usage (including disk space), you can put it in a VM and very rapidly recover in the case of issues.
You could of course also use a full Linux based router OS, but I don’t believe there are many with a web interface, which most users would prefer.
Yeah, not having cake sqm is the one thing that will probably kill Opnsense as a choice for some people. That’s not to say you cannot get excellent results with fq_codel, because you absolutely can (I actively use both OpenWRT and OPNSense on different network applications personally). It is definitely more work to get good results though. OPNSense’s wireguard support has been excellent for a number of years now, and it’s exclusively what I use for tunneling in a VPC I rent.
If you’re particularly constricted on host hardware and need a lightweight router to manage multiple other VMs on said host, I could definitely see the benefits of running a minimal OpenWRT over OPNSense in that case.
I have other issues with opnsense lately but it has some sort of bufferbloat mitigation that seemed good enough. On the 1000mbps from isp I get 0ms latency increase at the expense of like 100mbps, or 0ms average with some spikes with a 50mbps loss. Can it be done without any download reduction?
It does depend on the connection type, but the general rule is not completely, barring some connection types like DSL. Given it sounds like you have Fiber, DOCSIS, or similar; you likely fall under the general rule. That said, you can absolutely tune and test above the typical 10-15% safety margin many guides start with without actually incurring any noticeable bufferbloat. The 10-15% is usually a good value for ISPs that fluctuate heavily in available babdwidth to the customer, but for more consistent connections (or for those that overrate high enough that the bandwidth fluctuations sit out of range for what the customer is actually paying for), you can absolutely get much closer to your rated connection speed, if not meeting or even passing it.
The general process is to tune one value at the time (starting with the bandwidth allocations for your pipes), apply the changes, noting the previous value, and performing a bufferbloat test with Waveform’s or others’ testing tools. Optionally, (this will drastically slow down the process, but can be worth it) one should actually hammer the network with actual load for a good few hours while testing some real-world applications that are sensitive to bufferbloat. Doing this between tweaked values will help expose how stable or unstable your ISP’s connection truly is over time.
As for opensense, I just like openwrt better. Also yeah sure I bought a dumb switch and a standalone access point (some zyxel also running openwrt) for an extra ~120eur total but that’s a whole setup and it works quite well.
While that works, it will use more electricity than an all-in-one ARM based router. Depending on prices and renewable/fossil mixture where you live, this may or may not be a concern.
How is x86 openwrt? I’ve been on opnsense but my APs are openwrt and maybe I’m remembering wrong after a long time of not touching the management page but I could have sworn it used to detail what rate cables connect at and it doesn’t seem to any more without unrememberable shell commands, and at some point my lan domains stopped working, among other minor annoyances I could also swear are new since my absence.
Pretty much the same as any other incarnation of openwrt, just without a lot of the compatibility headaches and weird installation processes that you typically have with other architectures. It’s just install and forget pretty much.
As for the link speed, you can just
cat /sys/class/net/eth*/speedas with any other linux system. Not sure how your configurations stopped working or broke, maybe your storage got corrupted or something? Hard to tell, but I doubt openwrt caused it on its own, it sounds new to me.
I have a 12 year old Asus router that I use as a managed switch and its still getting openwrt updates
One vote for mini pc router with poe wifi ap. When I first set it up I had a tp omada wifi 5 and switched to a yuncore/kuwfi wifi 6 ap flashed with openwrt and I didn’t even have to touch the router config, although I did so the new ap would get the same ip as the old one.
As a path to ease in I was also considering keeping whichever of my older tomato and openwrt routers was more powerful processor wise with the wifi off and using the standalone APs as an upgrade to wifi5/6, but the used pc with 2.5gbe and 10gbit sfp+ came into my possession cheaply so I went for it.
PC router has opnsense though. I haven’t tested x86 openwrt. I also got it cheap because the sfp nic didn’t work, warning of checksum error but I fixed that using intel eeupdate (have to pirate/have nda breaker friend) on a portable windows 10 install.
Hardware routers can be killed for many reasons. Age and an inability to upgrade them to suit current needs is the biggest one. OEM’s do this fairly quickly as they build devices with the resources to work for today and maybe tomorrow. After their product is no longer made they want it to be obsolete not long after so they can claim they can support is no longer viable. Then you but another router and they make money.
OpenWRT tries to augment and support devices for as long as possible but at the same time the hardware limitations still exist and often the storage will no longer support the latest version due to the size of the new version.
As far as when that will happen depends on multiple factors that have the ability to change at any time. There viable be a massive flaw in a portion of the software that requires a huge rewrite and the addition of code that will make the software too large to fit.
Sometimes someone will create a version with less used features available so that it can still be used but it’s a losing battle
If you want true longevity repurpose an old computer into a router. OpnSense is what I use and recommend. Add in something like a TP-Link EAP650 or two and you have a rock solid platform that can handle a lot more and last much longer. Add Power Over Ethernet (POE) along with an Omada controller and you can position the AP in a place where it will work the best for your use. You can have enough access points to have a full signal anywhere even if your place is the size of the Louvre. When new technology comes out you can upgrade the AP’s as needed when needed and upgrade the router as well in a similar fashion.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point PoE Power over Ethernet VPN Virtual Private Network
[Thread #984 for this comm, first seen 6th Jan 2026, 02:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I’m going to be a little pedantic, for the sake of completeness, because I very much appreciate and value what Decronym bit did here and want it to cover any gaps that may arise (especially for newcomers).
AP doesn’t necessarily have to be wifi or wireless; I’ve used many hardwired APs. WAP stands for wireless access point, though it’s almost always shorthanded to AP (more so now, maybe, because of a dumbass song with the same name).
As an alternative to openwrt rather than getting consumer based hardware and flashing. Take a look at mikrotik I’ve been running a $40 wired router for years and it has tons of advanced features that are commercial grade.
They still push out firmware updates for devices first releases decades ago (eg rb433 from 2008. Wireless performance has improved but it’s still not quite there yet, mostly in the area of signal strength. Personally I don’t mind that with the ability to configure things in minute detail (if you want to). Superb hardware reliability and just all round great.
Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
No, they’re really good about supporting old routers for as long as possible. For many years the best router to use with OpenWRT was this one from 2002 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series
@rimu @Dust0741 Also, even if openwrt stops supporting it… If you have a router or firewall or something in front of your access point, then running an old version of openwrt isn’t really that much of a risk if we’re talking about residential wifi w/out a lot of coverage.
And that’s assuming you’d want to stick with a model that openwrt has dropped support for. If they do drop support in a few years, you could buy a newer (better supported) older model again for $40.
I’ve got an Asus router and it’s good, however I believe there have been some security concerns around Asus routers being used in botnets afaik. If I were to buy a new router today I would go for a gl.inet router
I own two GL.inet routers. I liked my Flint so much that I bought an Opal for my office and on the road. These machines are well provisioned. The OpenWRT reviews of them say to just leave the stock bootloader installed. I’ve installed all sorts of packages, multiple subnets, VPN, adblock, etc. GL.inet gear is good stuff.
I bought a Flint 2 last year. I’m very happy with it.
I would expect that the security issues are with the stock OS, but can’t argue with the gl.inet recommendation.
