Today, we at SFC, along with our OpenWrt member project, announce the production release of the OpenWrt One. This is the first wireless Internet router designed and built with your software freedom and right to repair in mind. The OpenWrt One will never be locked down and is forever unbrickable. This device services your needs as its owner and user. Everyone deserves control of their computing. The OpenWrt One takes a great first step toward bringing software rights to your home: you can control your own network with the software of your choice, and ensure your right to change, modify, and repair it as you like.
The in-place upgrade process leaves a lot to be desired, in my experience. I understand why routers with limited storage capacity wouldn’t be able to support it, but the lack of A-B partitioning support for x86 and ARM builds in 2024 is really stupid.
If an upgrade introduces a regression and breaks, my family is stuck without internet while I spend a few hours re-flashing an old release and making sure everything still works.
The Linksys WRT3200ACM has A/B firmware support, but unfortunately that router is starting to get a little outdated. Saved me from a couple bad upgrades, but unfortunately it died on me about 4 months ago. I updated to the Banana Pi BPI-R3, which has been great for my network speed, but was a lot more complicated to set up.
This, right here, has been my experience every time.
Also when you run a complicated setup with over a dozen VLANs, policy routing for failover internet on specific vlans, and nat66 support due to secondary internet only giving you a /64, yeah… not fun having to set all that up because the updater breaks, yeah… no.