I don't care. You will be treated how you treat others. You are endlessly arguing about stupid things, not listening, and wasting my time. I am not here to be your friend when you keep acting like tedious know-it-alls and shills as if everything is perfect with GL-iNet's severely outdated firmware, and acting as if I am stupid for asking GL-iNet to stay on top of LTS kernel updates for their customer's sakes.
By the way, I figured out why GL-iNet uses a dead, 700 day old kernel from March 2023:
It's... even worse than just a dead kernel... it's... because GL-iNet Flint 2 uses a dead, 700 day old OpenWrt release which died in May 2023:
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/security#support_status
OpenWrt has this to say about using OpenWrt 21 and other dead (abandoned/zero maintenance/no security updates) releases:
"Only supported OpenWrt releases are considered safe. Any use of unsupported versions is strongly discouraged due to multiple, severe, well-known, actively exploited security vulnerabilities in the kernel, third-party applications (OpenWrt packages), and 802.11 (WiFi) protocols."
And: "End of life means that we will not provide any updates even for severe security problems. Please update to more recent versions."
I guarantee you that GL-iNet is not monitoring the commits in the upstream repos (OpenWrt, the kernel, all OpenWrt packages) and maintaining and backporting the security-related code changes for OpenWrt, the kernel, the 4000+ different OpenWrt application packages, etc. They are shipping a dead version of OpenWrt -- and that's why the kernel is so old and dead. Because it's what originally shipped with the dead version of OpenWrt. It's as simple as that! And it's a more severe problem than I thought. It's not just an old kernel. It's a vulnerable version of OpenWrt and its packages.
If GL-iNet's op24 test release contained the closed-source Mediatek WiFi driver, I would honestly install the op24 snapshot test branch right away. Sadly I won't be able to use that until the open source WiFi driver becomes stable. People on this forum are still reporting lots of randomly high latency spikes and WiFi becoming slow after less than 3 days of uptime on the Flint 2 with op24, so I can't rely on op24 until the open driver is stable. Those problems are mentioned on the firmware download page by GL-iNet too:
https://dl.gl-inet.com/router/mt6000/open
Due to certain performance and compatibility issues with the open-source drivers for the model, firmware version 4.6.0 will utilize the MTK SDK to ensure a better user experience. If these issues are resolved in the future, we will revert to the Native OpenWrt version with the open-source driver. For customers preferring the open-source driver, we will provide a synchronized Native OpenWrt version labeled 4.x.x-opxx, based on the OpenWrt main branch with kernel version 6.6.x. The MTK SDK will be used for their 4.x version. We will continue to address bugs in the open-source version and will make it the main line if it eventually outperforms the closed-source.
If the closed-source driver can run on op24, then I'd love to see an official GL-iNet op24 release with the closed-source Mediatek drivers, @bruce. Is it possible that you can release op24-closedsource too? An op24 snapshot with official Mediatek drivers would be a great thing while we wait for a better op24 open release...
Edit: Actually... The quoted paragraph is really confusing. Is it saying that op24 already uses the closed-source Mediatek SDK after v4.6.0? But it simultaneously says "for people preferring the open-source driver we will provide 4.x.x-opxx". I really don't know what it's trying to say. Does your op24 release already use the closed-source driver or not? That would be great. I'm gonna upgrade immediately if that's the case.
PS: If anyone installs op24, you must manually do this patch for a bug in 4.7.0-op24: [4.7.0-op24] Known bugs - #17 by PanWise
Edit: Sadly, people are still reporting the WiFi signal dying in 4.7.0-op24. Seems it's not a usable option then. [4.7.0-op24] Known bugs - #57 by raphamotta and [4.7.0-op24] Known bugs - #36 by pupeto
Hopefully this mess will be resolved in a few months and we'll be able to use op24. I can see that GL-iNet is actively working on making the op24 branch usable. So at least I can look forward to that, hopefully early next year. 