Download Firmware OpenWrt 23.05.0

Version 23.05.0 of OpenWrt has been released. OpenWrt is alternative open source firmware for a large number various routers and embedded devices. The opkg package management system makes it possible to determine for yourself what the router can and cannot do. There are also several people actively working on it on GoT; see this topic for that. You can simply update the version with sysupgrade from the web interface. The changelog for this release can be found below.

Highlights in OpenWrt 23.05.0

OpenWrt 23.05.0 incorporates over 4300 commits since branching the previous OpenWrt 22.03 release and has been under development for over one year. Only the main changes are listed below. See changelog-23.05.0 for the full changelog.

Many new devices added

OpenWrt 23.05 supports over 1790 devices. Support for over 200 new devices was added in addition to the device support by OpenWrt 22.03.

• The ipq807x target for the Qualcomm IPQ807x Wifi 6 SoCs was added
• The mediatek/filogic subtarget for the Mediatek Filogic 830 and 630 SoCs was added
• The sifiveu target for the HiFive RISC-V Unleashed and Unmatched boards

Highlights of device support

• Switched ipq40xx target to DSA
• VDSL support on AVM FRITZ!Box 7530
• Support for devices with 2.5G PHYs
  • Acer Predator W6 (MT7986A), Mercusys MR90X v1 (MT7986BLA), Netgear WAX206 (MT7622), Netgear WAX220 (MT7986), ZyXEL NWA50AX Pro (MT7981), Asus (TUF Gaming) AX4200 (MT7986A), Netgear WAX218 (IPQ8074), Xiaomi AX9000 (IPQ8074), Dynalink DL-WRX36 (IPQ8074), GL.iNet GL-MT6000 (MT7986A), Netgear WAX620 (IPQ8072A), ZyXEL EX5700 (MT7986)
• Support for WiFi 6E (6GHz)
  • Acer Predator W6 (MT7986A), ZyXEL EX5700 (MT7986)
• 2 Gbps WAN/LAN NAT Routing on ramips MT7621 devices (See OpenWrt forum)
• Improved DSL statistics on ubus and in LuCI
• Added Arm SystemReady (EFI) compliant target replacing the armvirt target

Switch from wolfssl to mbedtls as default

OpenWrt has transitioned its default cryptographic library from wolfssl to mbedtls. This shift brings several changes and implications:

• Size Efficiency: mbedtls is considerably smaller, making it an optimal choice for systems where storage space is paramount.
• LTS and ABI Stability: mbedtls consistently provides updates via its Long Term Support (LTS) branch, ensuring both security and a stable application binary interface (ABI). In contrast, wolfssl does not offer an LTS release, and its stable ABI is limited to a specific set of functions.
• TLS 1.3 Support: Users should be aware that mbedtls 2.28 no longer supports TLS 1.3.

While mbedtls is now the default, users who have specific needs or preferences can still manually switch back to wolfssl or choose openssl.

Rust Package Support

This release introduces the ability to include rust-written programs into the OpenWrt package infrastructure. Examples are: bottom, maturin,aardvark-dns and ripgrep.

Core components update

Core components have the following versions in 23.05.0:

• Updated toolchain:
  • musl libc 1.2.4
  • glibc 2.37
  • gcc 12.3.0
  • binutils 2.40
• Updated Linux kernel
  • 5.15.134 for all targets
• Network:
  • hostapd master snapshot from September 2023, dnsmasq 2.89, dropbear 2022.82
  • cfg80211/mac80211 from kernel 6.1.24
• System user country:
  • busybox 1.36.1

In addition to the listed applications, many others were also updated.

Upgrading to 23.05.0

Sysupgrade can be used to upgrade a device from 22.03 to 23.05, and configuration will be preserved in most cases. Sysupgrade from 21.02 to 23.05 is not officially supported.

• ipq40xx EA6350v3, EA8300, MR8300 and WHW01 require tweak to the U-Boot environment on update from 22.03 to 23.05. Refer to the Device wiki or the instruction on sysupgrade on how to do this change. Config needs to be reset on sysupgrade.

Known issues

• lantiq/xrx200 target is not built because the DSA driver for the integrated GSWIP switch shows some error messages. (see: here)
• bcm53xx: Netgear R8000 and Linksys EA9200 Ethernet is broken (see: here)