14 DAY TRIAL // OpenWrt, a highly-extensible GNU/Linux distribution for embedded devices, built from the ground up to be a full-featured, easily modifiable operating system for routers, has advanced to version 14.07 RC1.
The OpenWrt project is famous for providing some of the most complex and useful operating systems for embedded devices. Its name is synonymous with high quality and great features and users expect the best when it comes to new releases.
"OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the restrictions of the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to use packages to customize an embedded device to suit any application."
"For developers, OpenWrt provides a framework to build an application without having to create a complete firmware image and distribution around it. For users, this means the freedom of full customization, allowing the use of an embedded device in ways the vendor never envisioned," reads the official website.
The OpenWrt developers have made quite a few changes and improvements in this first RC for the 14.07 release, which has been dubbed "Barrier Breaker."
According to the changelog, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.10, the new preinit, init, hotplug, and event system are written in C, native IPv6-support has been implemented, RA & DHCPv6+PD client and server are now available, local prefix allocation and source-restricted routes have been added, support has been implemented for sysupgrade on NAND-flash, support for filesystem snapshot and rollback is now available for users, the mounting system has been Rewritten in C for rootfs and block devices, and a data validation layer has been added.
Also, support has been added for testing configuration and rollback to the last working state, the change trigger system has been unified and can now restart services on-demand, Netifd now handles setup and configuration reload of wireless interfaces, support has been added for dynamic firewall rules and zones, DS-Lite support and improved 6to4, 6in4, and 6rd have been added, DNSSEC validation is now available for users, and much more.
A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official announcement. You can download OpenWrt 14.07 RC1 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only. Please keep in mind that this is an operating system and not a prepackaged firmware. It's possible that you might have to enable quite a few options to get everything set up properly.