Recientemente the news of the release of the new update of OpenWRT 19.07. in which new features are added Of which the support for the new WPA3 protocol stands out as well as support for new devices.
For those unfamiliar with OpenWrt they should know that this is a firmware based on a linux distribution is used in devices such as personal routers. The development of OpenWrt was initially promoted thanks to the GPL license, which forced all those manufacturers who modified and improved the code, to release it and contribute more and more to the project in general.
Little by little the software has grown and there are implemented features that many other manufacturers of commercial devices for the non-professional sector do not have, such as QoS, VPN and other features that give OpenWrt a really powerful and versatile device, suitable to use the hardware where OpenWrt runs not only to use them as routers, but as file servers, P2P nodes, WEBcam servers, firewall or VPN gateways.
OpenWrt supports many different platforms and architectures And it has a compilation system that facilitates convenient cross-compilation, which includes several components in it, which facilitates the creation of firmware or disk image ready and tailored for specific tasks with the desired set of pre-installed packages.
Main news of OpenWrt 19.07
Since the previous version of 18.06.0 there have been 3954 commits and hardware support has expanded to all supported platforms that now in this new version of OpenWrt 19.07 has been supplied a kernel version of Linux 4.14.162.
In addition to this, a of the main features of this release is whate added support for wireless security technology WPA3, which provides protection against password guessing attacks as it will not allow password guessing in offline mode and the SAE authentication protocol is used.
By default WPA3 support is not yet enabled y requires installation of additional packages which are hostapd-openssl or hostapd-wolfssl to create an access point and wpa-supplicant-openssl or wpad-openssl to work in client mode.
On the other hand, we can find that the web interface of LuCI has become client-side representationWhich saves server resources and increases productivity due to some operations performed by the browser (JavaScript code) and not by the Lua firmware scripts.
However, not all LuCI applications are adapted for this function and in case of problems, it is recommended to use the luci-compat package.
Regarding the support with this new version Support for the following platforms has been discontinued : adm5120, adm8668, ar7, au1000, ixp4xx, mcs814x, omap24xx, ppc40x, ppc44x. Also initial support was introduced for the new platform ath79 which replaces ar71xx and introduces the use of Device Tree.
And that ath79 and ar71xx can also be used in the OpenWRT 19.07 branch, but in one of the next versions, support for ar71xx will be discontinued, while for Ath79 support is provided for approximately 200 devices based on MIPS 24K processors.
Of course, there are also new versions of many packages, such as, hostapd 2.9, dnsmasq 2.80, dropbear 2019.78, busybox 1.30.1, gcc 7.5.0
Finally, another of the changes that stand out in the ad is that stools have been added to verify backups and update the capacity indicators to Sysupgrade.
Of the corrections made, work on network management, wireless configuration and also on the DHCPv6 client and server, as well as the process manager, the system message bus, the embedded web server, and the configuration management library.
If you want to know more about it about the details of this new release of firmware OpenWrt 19.07 you can check the information In the following link.
Download the new version of OpenWrt 19.07
The builds of this new version are prepared for 37 different platforms, from which update packages can be obtained from the link below.
Another thing is also that the Spanish translation was greatly improved. Thanks to me ???