What software components are required for full feature support of the Filogic 880 SOC on OpenWRT? I see that kernel source code is available (although not sure what the official GitHub link is) and there is work on getting everything upstreamed, but I’m not sure what else is required for a working build of OpenWRT, especially when talking about using specialized features of the Mediatek SOC.
Does the OpenWRT firmware rely on any proprietary binary blobs for communication with the hardware - for example, hardware offloading? I’m more familiar with the Android device side of things where the Linux source code is available thanks to the GPL but the HALs to talk to hardware are only distributed as binary blobs pulled from OEM firmware. The SOC manufacturer provides a BSP that enables Android support on the given SOC, but access to it is heavily restricted under NDA.
I’m wondering how much the BPI-R4 relies on proprietary software such as that, or if everything is distributed as source code. For example, is the Uboot and other lower-level firmware open source?
An old thread, but I’ll take a few minutes for a quick reply.
SoC are supported even in vanilla kernel, but OpenWRT adds some patches and often gets those added sooner. Probably because it’s seen as official supported platform by the vendor (MediaTek). They work with Open Source community and OpenWRT especially. They maintain a fork of OpenWRT on / - openwrt/feeds/mtk-openwrt-feeds - Gitiles where all new patches for the platform. I.e. including Linux kernel. They don’t actively maintain separate kernel repo, usually everything goes straight to OpenWRT and submitted for upstream later. They also send patches / PR for upstream OpenWRT. Actually they are probably most “Open Source friendly” SoC vendor currently. At least in that router/SBC target segment.
Well, actually just stuck on similar opinion: OpenWRT solves this by refusing to incorporate devices that require binary blobs... | Hacker News and I honestly think you could find a answer to at least half of these questions by looking them up first.
Only some of the integrated peripherals/IP cores requires closed source firmware. Crypto acceleration engine, network offloading engine and WiFi chipset (external but official mPCIe board). That’s all I can remember out of my head right now. These are firmwares, running on dedicated hardware units, not in the OS. This one actually have everything open sourced, including drivers, etc.
Platform support are pretty stable already. Still a lot of things to improve and bugs to fix, but at least it’s pretty stable and development is ongoing. Yet things for the BE14000 WiFi support pretty worse. Still a lot of features not implemented, connection and bandwidth issues, etc. But it’s progressing pretty well from both community and Mediatek.
U-Boot are open source software, it’s a 1 second lookup, honestly.