My new Flint 2 MT6000 is my first real foray into the OSS router world. As a relative noob, I like the simplicity of GL's OS gui that also provides the ability to access the Openwrt foundation. But as I gain experience and desire to experiment, I'm interested in trying the more recent stable 24.10 version of Openwrt rather than the (much) older 21.02 the current 4.7 is built upon.
Doing a lot of internet reading, I've seen multiple comments suggesting that GL might include their own radio chipset drivers for the WiFi compared to what plain Openwrt includes, and the reference Openwrt drivers don't provide the same level of performance compared to the GL drivers.
Is this correct? It seems like there would be improvements in both security and features in newer versions of Openwrt. My limited experience with OSS suggests to me that keeping up with the various releases (and their dependencies) is not as easy as it seems, which is why many open source projects tend to remain based on older versions that have proven stable. 4.7 for the Flint 2 was released very recently, and yet still is built on 3 year old Openwrt code... There must be reasons why GL did not use the most recent stable release for the current FW - which drives my hesitancy towards going to current Openwrt.
Since Flint 2 uses MTK hardware, the original closed-source driver will perform better wireless connection stability in some aspects (sure the Vanilla OpenWRT Open-Source driver is also good and stable), and the MTK driver is based on Openwrt 21.02, and this OpenWRT software version is also relatively stable.
Using an open-source driver version requires a lot of R&D resources to verify and adapt.
But for Flint 2, we will keep updating the two driver versions, allowing users to choose what they like and suitable for own needs.
Generally the new GL function will be released first on closed-source drivers, and the GL firmware of the open-source version will be updated later, but no too long.
Thank you for the insight. I suspected something along these lines - many people have the impression that open source somehow reduces R&D needs, but I suspect that in many cases it actually makes things more complicated. Especially when you have to combine closed source code with open source code.
EDIT - it would be really nice if users could somehow have access to the closed source MTK drivers so they could integrate them into Openwrt on their own via compiling their own binaries.
So, I've been doing some more reading on the subject and think I better understand what's going on... It looks like this topic can be rather divisive and people can get cranky because GL continues to use an old version of Opnewrt - but the problem is MediaTek themselves, who have yet to release drivers for their own products that are compatible with the current Openwrt release:
You'd think it would be in MediaTek's best interest to provide more up-to-date drivers for their own products so companies like GL could use their chips to sell more products to consumers.
I don't know what the holdup is on MTK's end - I hope they get their stuff together soon lol! For all the advantages of open source, the downside is the limited availability of good official drivers from the chip manufacturers…. A Wi-Fi router is only as good as it’s radio chipsets.
Dunno about the Flint but for the Beryl ax the open source driver is more stable than the closed source driver so not sure about better stability on closed source. The general consensus is always “try op24” when people have wireless issues and that seems to solve it. So claiming the closed source driver has better performance is questionable…
