toh:recommended_routers

Recommended routers

Introduction

Really specific per scenario but these are generic recommendations based upon what's considered "reasonable" in terms of reliability and performance. Please note that the OpenWrt project itself does not endorse any hardware or manufacturer unless there's a public statement, this is solely a list put together by the community. General recommendations are at least 8Mbyte of flash and 64Mbyte of RAM, 16Mbyte of flash and 128Mbyte of RAM or more doesn't hurt however. Platforms that have less than 8Mbyte of flash will have noticeable space constraints, this can be remedied by using extroot (external storage) to some extent. Having less than 64Mbyte of RAM also imposes limitations, basic network functionality may work however there are reports of memory errors while using opkg and luci among other services which may operate unreliable or in worst case freeze the system. You can work around this somewhat by using a swap device but it's not entirely a substitute for actual RAM. It's much slower and requires external storage which may lead to system instability if you overload (use too much memory) your device and not suitable for using flash drives due to limited writes in total. This page was solely created because people kept asking this question each and every day on #openwrt @ Freenode. Please also read the wiki page for the specific device as there may be information not mentioned here that may be of value. If a specific SoC/model isn't listed please look here.

Platforms

(Qualcomm) Atheros ar71xx

Mediatek MT7621(A/AT)

Why isn't my device/platform listed?

There may be several reasons, here's a few: Unavailable

Not supported

Requires serial access (may not be an issue for some) for flashing and/or recovery.

Unstable

Marvell Armada 385 aka 88F6820

This is a relatively new platform based on ARM compared to the other ones here that are MIPS based. It offers the best performance but is also in general the most expensive one. It offers 2 cores running at 1.6Ghz and does linespeed NAT. It's usually coupled with wifi using the mwlwifi driver which is considered unstable for now and may crash the system occationally. Wired performance and stability is good(?), USB (status?), SATA (status?) however. As of writing there are no known user friendly products available that OpenWrt supports, serial access is needed for recovery and stability isn't (yet) up the standard of the other platforms.

MediaTek MT7620A