logoalt Hacker News

mindslighttoday at 12:34 AM1 replyview on HN

I'm no fan of imaginary property, but you're going to have to lay out your reasoning here. Firmware security is such crap precisely because most hardware manufacturers see it as nothing but a cost center they wish they could avoid.

The difficulty of installing OpenWRT or Linux in general on hardware comes from that hardware not being documented, or not having straightforward APIs like BIOS/EFI.

Or for some devices, community distributions that dubiously remix manufacturer-supplied binaries are available. But we generally see that as soon as the manufacturer stops their updates, the community versions start lagging behind as well.


Replies

M95Dtoday at 8:37 AM

> not having straightforward APIs like BIOS/EFI.

Oh, no, not this again!

> But we generally see that as soon as the manufacturer stops their updates, the community versions start lagging behind as well.

Care to demonstrate that?

The reason OpenWrt abandoned most routers was

1) insufficient flash space in the kernel partition, or insufficient total flash space in no-USB, no-SPI routers,

2) unwillingness to repartition flash because it breaks compatibility with official firmware (as if anyone installing OpenWrt would care),

3) insufficient RAM to run newer kernels

and, most importantly,

4) unwillingness to support older kernels like DD-WRT does.

show 1 reply