14 DAY TRIAL // It's been more than six months since the OpenWrt developers announced the release of the OpenWrt "Barrier Breaker" 14.07 custom firmware for routers, but today they've just informed us of the immediate availability for download of the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming OpenWrt "Chaos Calmer" 15.05 update.
According to the release notes, the biggest feature of the OpenWrt "Chaos Calmer" 15.05 RC1 release is the upgrade to the LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel 3.18, which should add support for new devices. Additionally, the release includes improved security features like support for jails, hardened builds, and a revised package signing architecture derived from ed25519.
Lots of networking improvements were implemented in the OpenWrt "Chaos Calmer" 15.05 RC1 release, such as support for numerous 3G and 4G modems, support for 464XLAT (CLAT), support for self-managing networks, better support for DNSSEC, and support for Smart Queue Management (SQM) QoS, Traffic Shaping, and AQM.
Moreover, there are enhancements to Netfilter's performance, better support for MAP-T and MAP-E IPv4 transitioning technologies, improved multi-core support for the network stack, and support for bootstrapping and detection of IPv4-only, IPv6-only, DS-Lite, Dual-Stack, 6rd, MAP-T, MAP-E, LW4over6, and 464XLAT.
OpenWrt 15.05 will bring support for new drivers and platforms
In addition to the changes mentioned above, the first Release Candidate version of OpenWrt 15.05 adds support for new drivers and platforms, such as mt7621 subtarget for Mediatek 11ac SoC, mt76 mac80211-based WiFi driver for MTK 11ac cores, mwlwifi mac80211-based WiFi driver for the Marvell 88W8864, and Raspberry Pi 2.
Furthermore, there's support for the BCM63268 and BCM6318 family, support for bcm53xx target for Broadcom ARM BCM47xx/53xx devices, and improved fallback sprom support with bcma support in brcm63xx. Also, feeds of externally maintained targets are now supported.
You can download OpenWrt "Chaos Calmer" 15.05 RC1 right now via Softpedia or from the project's website, but please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that contains known issues. Thus, we advise you not to install it on your router and wait for the final release to get out.