The OpenWrt Team is happy to announce the beta release of Attitude Adjustment (12.09)

This release is sligthly overdue, but it is now ready for testing.

The binaries are available here:

http://downloads.openwrt.org/attitude_a … 2.09-beta/

These are the beta binaries. We will not be merging anything new into trunk until we think that the binaries have had enough test coverage and potential bugs have been fixed. Once that stage is reached, we will branch and generate the final release binaries. We expect this process to take between 2-4 weeks.

EOL Notice for brcm-2.4:

Kernel 2.4 support has been dropped from Attitude Adjustment. For most devices using brcm47xx images is fine, but older models with only 16 MiB RAM or slower CPUs (200 Mhz) will not run properly with it. So for those devices, sticking with backfire is recommended.

Whats new in AA ?

Target specific improvements:

* [ar71xx]: support for more ar71xx devices

* [ramips]: support for Ralink devices

* [bcm47xx]: better support and image for Broadcom BCM4705 SOCs

Support for serial flash in brcm47xx

Fix out of memory when using wifi on BCM5354

* [lantiq]: Almost complete Lantiq SoC support

New Asterisk channel driver for Lantiq TAPI

* [x86]: sysupgrade support

General improvements:

* Improved LuCI interface

* Switch to the netifd infrastructure for better network configuration support

* Fixed Imagebuilder, relocatable SDK

* Full (?) eglibc support

* Release support for bridge firewalling

* Vastly improved ath9k driver stability and performance

* Dependency fixes for packages

* More iptables addons, improved netfilter performance

* Experimental support for 5 and 10MHz channels in ath5k and ath9k

* Support for 6RD configuration

* Experimental crashlog feature to track kernel oopses

* Reduced space requirements and improved squashfs/kernel compression

* Various package improvements and updates

Known issues that will get fixed during the beta phase:

* the new ramips switch driver seems to cause problems on some boards

* somehow vr9 images are not properly generated

* 11b/g atheros units might have gpio problems due to the new gpiolib driver

OpenWrt is a project based on a consensus decision model amongst the core team developers. With over 1000 binary packages, the Attitude Adjustment release is the biggest to date.

These 1000+ packages have the inherent problem that they need to be maintained. As the name of the release already suggests things are in a process of adjusting. The main change is that the developer group has arrived at the mutual agreement, that the packages feed is too much bloat for the project to carry around. This massive set of packages causes the developers not to have enough time for the core of OpenWrt. The result is: The package feed is not being maintained in a way that ensures the required quality.

OpenWrt receives up to 20 new packages and updates every day. It is simply not possible for the core developers to test this constant stream of additions (beyond a basic compile test). In response to this, it has been decided that only packages with a dedicated maintainer will be supported. These maintained packages will be moved into the main repo, which has a set of clear guidelines as to what is merged under which conditions. OpenWrt will no longer merge anything and everything that is sent on one of the many channels that can be used for contributing.

We hope that by this split of maintained and unmaintained packages will benefit everyone. If you want to help by dedicating some of your time into maintaining a package - and/or merging patches - then please contact a member of the core developer team.

The next big change is that we will no longer accept patches via trac. Please only file bug reports there. All patches contributed via trac will be closed without discussion. If you want to contribute use the openwrt-devel mailing list.

We already agreed on the roadmap for the upcoming AA+1 release which we expect to finish around christmas time.

The planned roadmap includes:

* Kernel v3.6 - this has cool new stuff such as the removal of the routing cache ...

* Improve core integration and push the netfid / ubus concept to extended parts of the system

* Port as many targets to the DeviceTree framework as possible

* Further work on IPv6, bufferbloat, ...

* Lantiq VDSL support

* Optional SSP+PIE+PaX support

* Rearrange the packages, as described above

* Other cool things we can come up with

Please start testing and help us make this release a good one :-)

The OpenWrt Release Team