[Cerowrt-devel] So how far behind is the embedded router world, still?

[Jim Gettys]

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 at 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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>
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