Firmware Update: OpenWrt 22.03.0

Version 22.03.0 of OpenWrt has been released. OpenWrt is alternative open source firmware for a large number different routers and embedded devices. By means of the opkg package management system, there is the possibility to determine for yourself what the router can and cannot do. Also on GoT there are several people actively involved, see this topic. You can simply update the version with sys upgrade from the web interface. The most important improvements that have been made in this release are listed below for you.

Firewall4 based on nftables

Firewall4 is used by default instead of firewall3 in the OpenWrt default images. Firewall4 uses nftables instead of iptables to configure the Linux netfilters.

Firewall4 uses the same UCI firewall configuration. Old firewall configurations should still work with firewall4, using nftables now. The extra option which allowed to add custom iptables commands does not work any more.

iptables is not included in the default images any more, it can be added with opkg or ImageBuilder if needed. iptables-nft, arptables-nft, ebtables-nft and xtables-nft provide the known command line interface from the old tools, but they will create nftables entries instead.

Many new devices added

OpenWrt 22.03 supports over 1580 devices. Support for over 180 new devices was added in addition to the device support by OpenWrt 21.02. OpenWrt 22.03 supports more than 15 devices capable of Wifi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax) using the MediaTek MT7915 wifi chip.

• The qoriq target for the NXP QorIQ (PowerPC) was added in OpenWrt 22.03.
• The bmips target for the Boardcom MIPS BCM33xx, BCM63xx and BCM7xxx SoCs was added.

More targets converted to DSA

The following targets or boards were migrated from swconfig to DSA with OpenWrt 22.03 in addition to the systems already migrated with OpenWrt 21.02:

• bcm53xx: All board using this target were converted to DSA
• lantiq: All boards using the xrx200 / vr9 SoC
• sunxi: Bananapi Lamobo R1 (only sunxi board with switch)

Dark mode in LuCI

The LuCI bootstrap design supports a dark mode. The default design activates dark mode depending on the browser settings. Change it manually at “System” → “System” → “Language and Style”.

Year 2038 problem handled

OpenWrt 22.03 uses musc 1.2.x, which changed the time_t type from 32 bit to 64 bit on 32 bit systems, on 64 bit system it was always 64 bit long. When a Unix timestamp is stored in a signed 32 bit integer it will overflow on January 19, 2038. With the change to 64 bit this will happen 292 billion years later. This is a change of the musl libc ABI and needs a recompilation of all user space applications linked against musl libc. For 64 bit systems this was done when the ABI was defined many years ago, the glibc ARC ABI already has a 64 bit time_t.

Core components update

Core components have the following versions in 22.03.0-rc6:

• Updated tool chain:
  • musl libc 1.2.3
  • glibc 2.34
  • gcc 11.2.0
  • binutils 2.37
• Updated Linux kernel
  • 5.10.138 for all targets
• Network:
  • hostapd 2.10, dnsmasq 2.86, dropbear 2022.82
  • cfg80211/mac80211 from kernel 5.15.58
• System user country:
  • busy box 1.35.0

In addition to the listed applications, many others were also updated see the detailed change log for more information.