CeroWrt 3.10.50-1 -- Declaring Victory

We are extremely pleased to report that CeroWrt has been highly stable since it was built over six months ago. We recently surveyed our user base, and uptimes are terrific - ranging as high as 124 days, with a lion’s share of the reports greater than 80 days. Most of the reasons for reboots are due to things like power failures. CeroWrt is meeting its design goals:

• Reliable, secure, high performance home router
• Bufferbloat has been controlled with fq_codel and the sqm-scripts
• IPv6 just works, either from a native provider, such as Comcast, or through a tunnel such as Hurricane Electric
• DNSSEC just works
• We’ve proved the value of routing different interfaces, instead of bridging together the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and Ethernet interfaces
• And lots more

The latest CeroWrt 3.10.50-1 was resync’d with the OpenWrt sources on 28 July 2014. Therefore, the CeroWrt builds have ceased to change from that date. You can review the build history from the CeroWrt release notes at: http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/CeroWrt_310_Release_Notes

That said, there are a few important efforts to take into account:

1. We have aggressively pushed the interesting changes back into the OpenWrt mainline. All these changes are now available through the standard OpenWrt builds.
2. CeroWrt development is dormant at the moment as we begin to think about the next step - how to “make wi-fi fast”. (There are a number of bad behaviors in most wi-fi drivers that lower your wi-fi performance far below what is theoretically possible. We want to fix this.)
3. OpenWrt has declared victory on their “Barrier Breaker” (BB) firmware evolution based on a Linux 3.10 kernel. They are now pursuing their “Chaos Calmer” (CC) build based on 3.18 (or later) kernel. CC will have all the goodness of BB, plus the new features they’re planning.

Advice:

• If you already own a Netgear WNDR 3800 (or 3700v2), you certainly won’t go wrong with the CeroWrt 3.10.50-1 build. But don’t run out and buy one today - they’re becoming scarce and expensive.
• If you’re looking for stable, well-supported router firmware for your home, consider the OpenWrt BB build. It’s available for a wide variety of routers, and incorporates most of the major capabilities that we put into CeroWrt.
• If you’re willing to put up with a little testing, check out the OpenWrt CC builds. That software is undergoing constant development, tweaks, and enhancements, and contains all the goodness of CeroWrt.
• If you really want to live on the bleeding edge, join the CeroWrt Developer’s list https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel to keep an eye on (or help with!) developments here. In a few months, we’re planning to do more work on wi-fi, potentially on new, more available, higher performance hardware.