I've surveyed firmware twice; once at the beginning of the bufferbloat effort and most recently again a couple or three years ago. The first time was with 3-4 routers, and the second time 5-6 routers.

The typical *minimum* age of any software package inside for the vendors I happened to choose were around 4 years old, on "latest and greatest" routers.  I did not see significant change between the two surveys.  Also "amusing" (not) were finding things like versions of telnet included that had not had a maintainer for over a decade, and similar disasters.

5-7 is still my guess for most routers sold, on this limited data sets.
                                         - Jim




On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 2:50 PM Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com> wrote:
back in 2011, 2012 jim and I and others looked hard at the kernels and
software being sold then to end-users.

We concluded that the embedded router world was running 5-7 years
behind linux mainline, sometimes as much as 10, and that the embedded
linux world had been decimated by the great recession causing the
collapse of companies like montavista.

I recently took apart verizon FIOS's current firmware for one of their
more popular routers. It's still running 2.6.21, which shipped in
june, 2007. Overgeneralizing from this one data point, I am wondering
if the trendline for new routing products tracking current software
has got worse or better? I have generally assumed that "new wifi
features" was a fundamental driver for semi-newer kernel versions in
new products, and not much else. Edgerouters are still 3.10. I know of
more than a few pre-bufferbloat-era things going back even further
than that, but most hackerboards I've played with also don't go back
very far. Odroid C2 was still 3.10 last I looked.

There are still a few companies alive in this space (openrg being one
that I know nothing about), but...

--

Dave Täht
CEO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-669-226-2619
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