I don't think the situation is as bad as coreboot: Both the vendor firmwares and OpenWRT are Linux based so there is already some base for compatibility. And Op

I don't think the situation is as bad as coreboot: Both the vendor firmwares and OpenWRT are Linux based so there is already some base for compatibility. And OpenWRT is not fully objected to blobs in drivers, so they don't need necessarily go digging down every smallest detail. Finally e.g. Asus has been publishing their firmware "sources" (containing gazillion blobs) so you don't need to do full blackbox reverse-engineering to reuse stuff there. There is this whole asusmerlin project repackaging the Asus firmwares: https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng Ultimately lot of the issues fall down on Broadcom and Qualcomm being what they are and not even trying to upstream their drivers and other bits. I don't know if we ever will see another wifi chipset that will have as good and long support as ath9k.