Det numera Belkin-ägda nätverksföretaget Linksys slår på stora trumman med lanseringen av den trådlösa routern WRT1900AC. Det stora försäljningsargumentet är möjligheten att byta ut den medföljande mjukvaran till öppna alternativ, men nu menar skaparna bakom öppenkällkodsprojektet OpenWRT att det påståendet inte riktigt stämmer överens med verkligheten.

Enligt OpenWRT pågår visserligen ett samarbete med Belkin, men att det kvarstår en hel del arbete innan den nya routern kan anses vara en kompatibelt plattform. Bland annat saknas fortfarande en fungerande implementation för den trådlösa nätverkskretsen från Marvell, vars drivrutin inte bygger på öppen källkod.

Skaparna menar därför att Linksys går händelserna i förväg med alla påståenden om att WRT1900AC har stöd för OpenWRT och andra tredjepartsalternativ med öppen mjukvara. Tvärtom anses marknadsföringen förvilla konsumenterna.

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Update on Linksys WRT1900AC support

Given the confusion that the mentions of OpenWrt support in Linksys press releases have caused, we would like to clarify the state of WRT1900AC support in OpenWrt and the ongoing collaboration with Linksys.

Members of the OpenWrt team have been in contact with Linksys for a while, discussing collaboration on device support in OpenWrt.
There had been no technical collaboration on device support until Belkin engineers posted a few incomplete patches in early April. These patches are currently being cleaned up, as they do not meet our quality standards.

The most important part that is still missing is a usable driver for the Marvell 802.11ac wireless chipset. Belkin is working on fixing this, but they have not given us an estimation on when such a driver will be provided.

The default firmware for this device seems to be using a proprietary driver provided by Marvell, which uses non-standard APIs for configuration. We don't know if Marvell will open source this driver, or will work on an alternative Linux driver. We believe that both approaches require a considerable amount of effort and time.

Because of these issues, we would currently recommend against purchasing this device until we have the missing pieces of software to make it functional with OpenWrt.

The Linksys press release claims that the device is "OpenWrt ready" and "Open Source ready". Given how much is still missing, and that not even the GPL code for this device was posted to the Linksys GPL code center, we consider these claims to be premature and unfortunately misleading.

Regards,
The OpenWrt Team

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