3 ms·

In my experience, the DD-WRT firmwares are on the same level as XDA android images. Yes, the overall feature set is richer, and performance might be better. Bu

In my experience, the DD-WRT firmwares are on the same level as XDA android images. Yes, the overall feature set is richer, and performance might be better. But all that is offset by some completely ridiculous bugs, like having to modify 5ghz wifi settings only via cli, because touching a single switch on web-based admin panel causes it to die (my current tp-link). And there have been bugs like that on every router I've tried. Always some catch. It might very well even boil down to issues on the hardware level, but the point still stands - the combination has never been stable enough.

shmerl 10y ago
Sure, development builds can vary in quality, especially on different hardware. It also depends on WiFi driver quite a lot. In case of WRT1900ACS at least, my experience was quite good. It's using mwlwifi: https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi
lbenes 10y ago
That's a terrible analogy. I use both cyanogenmod/XDA images on my phone and custom firmware on my routers. There is no comparison. The XDA images lack drivers, feature, and have strange bugs. While the DD-WRT is rock solid, years of uptime. I flashed my parents classic WRT-54G with DD-WRT and 6 years later it was still running without a single reboot(networking equip on UPS). I also have another linksys that's sold as a router that I turned into a wireless bridge for the corner of my house. This also has never had to be rebooted. Finally my ASUS AC1900 has been running merlin for years now and also rock solid. As long as you use stable branches, Merlin, DD-WRT, and OpenWrt are a huge upgrade in stability over factory firmware. Of course, you need to run them on decent quality hardware like classic Linksys or Asus. TP-LINK is cheap chinese crap. It gets poor reviews for a reason. Even the best OS/firmware can't make up for hardware bugs.
dzhiurgis 10y ago
> modify 5ghz wifi settings only via cli, Sounds better than trying to setup Java though. Also, I've checked their site a year or two ago, they didn't even had 802.11ac option at that time. That said, they do have pretty annoying bugs, but hey, its supports hundreds of devices... Anyway, apparently DD-WRT hasn't been a good choice for years and, according to kids, OpenWRT should be replaced with https://lede-project.org https://lede-project.org .
danudey 10y ago
Not to mention that for a lot of routers, DD-WRT (and the like) will install and boot and work but they won't support all of the features; I've heard quite a few cases where AC routers would only work in N mode, or where you could set options that the hardware didn't support (and thus wouldn't take effect), and so on. It's not their fault, necessarily; it's one team which has to maintain support for effectively hundreds of devices, and that's pretty complicated. Still, there isn't a lot of obvious warning that 'hey, a bunch of what makes your router great isn't going to work if you install this so that might not be what you want.' My E4200 was a great example. Got it because it was well-reviewed and supported DD-WRT and the like, but changed back to the stock firmware because DD-WRT was unstable and slow. After a week of frustrating performance issues and iffy connectivity, I refreshed with the stock firmware and everything was suddenly behaving the way it should. The same thing happened with my R6250; flashed, had problems, unfleshed. DD-WRT seems like a good way to extend the life and usefulness of existing routers, and not a way to make the latest technology work even better; in my experience, it tends to have the exact opposite effect.

shmerl 10y ago

Sure, development builds can vary in quality, especially on different hardware. It also depends on WiFi driver quite a lot. In case of WRT1900ACS at least, my experience was quite good. It's using mwlwifi: https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi https://github.com/kaloz/mwlwifi

lbenes 10y ago

That's a terrible analogy. I use both cyanogenmod/XDA images on my phone and custom firmware on my routers. There is no comparison. The XDA images lack drivers, feature, and have strange bugs. While the DD-WRT is rock solid, years of uptime. I flashed my parents classic WRT-54G with DD-WRT and 6 years later it was still running without a single reboot(networking equip on UPS). I also have another linksys that's sold as a router that I turned into a wireless bridge for the corner of my house. This also has never had to be rebooted. Finally my ASUS AC1900 has been running merlin for years now and also rock solid. As long as you use stable branches, Merlin, DD-WRT, and OpenWrt are a huge upgrade in stability over factory firmware. Of course, you need to run them on decent quality hardware like classic Linksys or Asus. TP-LINK is cheap chinese crap. It gets poor reviews for a reason. Even the best OS/firmware can't make up for hardware bugs.

dzhiurgis 10y ago

> modify 5ghz wifi settings only via cli, Sounds better than trying to setup Java though. Also, I've checked their site a year or two ago, they didn't even had 802.11ac option at that time. That said, they do have pretty annoying bugs, but hey, its supports hundreds of devices... Anyway, apparently DD-WRT hasn't been a good choice for years and, according to kids, OpenWRT should be replaced with https://lede-project.org https://lede-project.org .

danudey 10y ago

Not to mention that for a lot of routers, DD-WRT (and the like) will install and boot and work but they won't support all of the features; I've heard quite a few cases where AC routers would only work in N mode, or where you could set options that the hardware didn't support (and thus wouldn't take effect), and so on. It's not their fault, necessarily; it's one team which has to maintain support for effectively hundreds of devices, and that's pretty complicated. Still, there isn't a lot of obvious warning that 'hey, a bunch of what makes your router great isn't going to work if you install this so that might not be what you want.' My E4200 was a great example. Got it because it was well-reviewed and supported DD-WRT and the like, but changed back to the stock firmware because DD-WRT was unstable and slow. After a week of frustrating performance issues and iffy connectivity, I refreshed with the stock firmware and everything was suddenly behaving the way it should. The same thing happened with my R6250; flashed, had problems, unfleshed. DD-WRT seems like a good way to extend the life and usefulness of existing routers, and not a way to make the latest technology work even better; in my experience, it tends to have the exact opposite effect.