DD-WRT and OpenWRT
I want to make a clarity about DD-RT and OpenWRT referred in my last article. Actually, DD-RT is differient totally with OpentWRT. DD-RT is one variety from Sveasoft early modification to Linksys open source, and OpenWRT is a real embeded linux based firmware, it’s not only firmware I think. The following is comments one guy made on DD-WRT forum. Now forward it below:
Hi there,
I know that this is not the OpenWrt forum, but I’d like to clear out some of the misconceptions about OpenWrt which seem to be prevalent here.
First of all: People comparing OpenWrt and DD-WRT often tend to view OpenWrt as just another end user firmware, which is simply wrong.
OpenWrt does not try to be a firmware that just crams more features into Broadcom based routers. If this was our goal, then our software would in fact be overengineered.
In fact we solve entirely different problems. We make it a lot easier to produce a firmware that works on lots of different hardware and is easy to port to many other devices, and we also want to build a reliable firmware and package base that saves you from writing the same things over and over again and constantly reinventing the wheel.
If you only focus on the regular end users, then you will see more of those in DD-WRT for sure. But we are quite successful with people that need to build their own customized firmware for things that are simply not covered by a regular router firmware with a pretty web interface.
Sure, it’s possible to hack a few extra packages into DD-WRT and recompile the whole thing. Maybe change a few web pages as well. But what if you want to change the whole firmware system to make it usable for a completely different purpose that we didn’t even think about? This would be a really tough job with DD-WRT, even if it had an easier build environment. And you’d be reinventing the wheel again, because a lot of the base system would become unusable for you in this case.
Secondly, regarding the comments about buildroot-ng: A lot of issues that we’re fixing in this redesign were brought up by our users and were considered important to fix. So we did things like massively reducing the number of files you have to edit in order to add a package, automatically resolving dependencies and rebuilding packages that have changed and so on…
The feedback on buildroot-ng from users that were already using ‘Kamikaze’ was mostly very positive, especially from those that did lots of custom builds and large scale rollouts.
Another thing: While we are admittedly often too lazy to write good documentation (with a few exceptions of course, like this nice introduction to buildroot-ng: http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=31794#p31794), we do put a lot of effort into separating all our changes into individual patchsets that can be reviewed and merged.
If you’re a developer, then you can follow the progress of OpenWrt and its components with our Trac system (https://dev.openwrt.org) quite easily.
So to compare OpenWrt and DD-WRT in a different way:
- DD-WRT is mostly for end users only
- OpenWrt is aimed at developers, rather than people that don’t know anything about Linux
- DD-WRT makes things easy for end users by giving them a nice web interface
- OpenWrt makes things easy for developers by giving them lots of patches and a nice, clean build environment.
Cheers,
- nbd (OpenWrt developer)
Sveasoft just released their Talisman firmware to the public for free. You can download it directly from their web site.
Comment by Anonymous — 2007-09-16 @ 11:34 pm