[philjohn]

There's a push at the moment to get the Qualcomm QSDK hardware offloading ported to modern kernels for IPQ8064 (Dual Core Arm SoC with an additional 2 Packet Processing cores) - sadly, Qualcomm haven't kept pace with upstream Kernel dev so it's a mammoth task.

And that's the crux of the problem with these SoC's - they can have fantastic packet processing performance (and in the case of the IPQ8064 NSS cores accelerated PPPoE, qdisc and crypto) but it's all tied up in vendor only repos, doesn't track upstream and so you're stuck with buggy vendor firmware.

[oneowl]

I was reading QSDK page [1] and it seems to me that they are doing something different from openwrt.

>The QCA Software Development Kit (QSDK) project allows users to build an OpenWrt based platform containing additional enhancements for Qualcomm Atheros chipsets that have not yet made it into the public OpenWrt repository.

I'm not aware of the project goals so I may be wrong.

[1] https://wiki.codeaurora.org/xwiki/bin/QSDK/

[philjohn]

Sort of - QSDK uses an old version of OpenWRT and a 3.x Linux Kernel to allow board partners (e.g. Netgear et al) to use their reference designs and spin up a working home router firmware quickly and easily.

An awful lot of devices these days ship with firmware that is actually OpenWRT (often v10-v15) based.

The actual NSS kernel modules have source available, and this is pulled into QSDK OpenWRT builds, but they've not had much luck getting stuff upstreamed[1] and getting them working on a recent 4.x kernel is non trivial.

This was also before the netfilter flow offloading framework, so the work is further compounded because they used their own offloading system.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/1/8/534

[workrockin]

> An awful lot of devices these days ship with firmware that is actually OpenWRT (often v10-v15) based.

This is a great explanation and it answers some of my questions as well. But I have one more. I have not worked with the devices that you mention but I was thinking that if they already have openwrt what is stopping an end user to simply update to the latest version?

Is there some kind of hardware incompatibility or maybe disabled updates?

[philjohn]

Versions of OpenWRT are tied to different Kernel versions, it's an entire distro, not just a layer above the Kernel.

So the QCA NSS drivers, for example, are kernel modules. The source is fully open and available, but trying to get it to build on the 4.14.x kernel used by OpenWRT is an exercise in futility unless you know the linux networking code inside out, as well as understand what the drivers are doing.

Work is ongoing and some progress is being made for the IPQ8064, and some mediatek SoC's not have full hardware offloading, but taking vendor provided code and massaging it into something acceptable either by OpenWRT (they are loathe to do as it's a huge job) or the upstream Kernel is a huge effort.

[knownunown]

The manufacturer usually modifies OpenWRT/QSDK to support their device. AFAIK, most of the time individual components from the device (CPU, Ethernet switch, wireless chip) are already supported in OpenWRT, it's just that the specific combo that the device contains just isn't there yet. This configuration is done with the device tree. On top of that, some manufacturers (Tp-Link, for example) don't use the standard OpenWRT sysupgrade image format, so the device rejects the new firmware that you try to flash.