Belkin Begins Releasing OpenWRT Code For The WRT1900AC

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 4 April 2014 at 10:00 AM EDT. 7 Comments
HARDWARE
A few months ago we wrote about Linksys Reviving The WRT54G Router In 802.11AC Form. Belkin, which owns Linksys, has begun releasing code for this new router -- the WRT1900AC -- but with this early code is still some glaring problems.

Matthew Fatheree of Belkin began releasing the WRT1900AC router code on Thursday to the OpenWRT community. The WRT1900AC code is based upon OpenWRT trunk and was announced to the public OpenWRT mailing list.

With this being Belkin's first and early patch, issues were quickly spotted by OpenWRT developers... The issues pointed out that will hopefully be addressed by Belkin include:

- The WiFi driver is not open-source but a pre-compiled kernel module. OpenWRT won't accept this upstream but reportedly Belkin is still working on the WiFi driver and reiterated this is early patch work. "There is still some work to be done on the wireless driver, but our intention was to get this process started, so we could address any issues as soon as possible."

- A fan controller driver (fan_ctrl.c) with this WRT1900AC patch calls a user-space application from kernel space... From a shell script is also support for accessing registers.

We'll see what else turns up moving forward and how open Belkin will be with WRT1900AC open-source improvements to let the WRT54G live on in an 802.11ac world.
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