Gluon 2018.2
OpenWrt has been updated to the new major release 18.06.x. Depending on the target, this includes the Linux kernel 4.9.146 or 4.14.89.
The new OpenWrt release introduces a dependency on GNU time. On Debian/Ubuntu, this can be found in the package time. The shell builtin time, which is available by default, is not sufficient.
Added hardware support
ar71xx-generic
AVM
Fritz!WLAN Repeater 450E
Ocedo
Koala
TP-Link
Archer C7 v5
TL-WR810N v1
Ubiquiti
UniFi AC Mesh Pro
ZyXEL
NBG6616
ipq40xx [1] [2]
AVM
FRITZ!Box 4040
GL.iNet
GL-B1300
NETGEAR
EX6100v2
EX6150v2
OpenMesh
A42
A62
ZyXEL
NBG6617
WRE6606
ramips-mt7621 [2]
D-Link
DIR-860L B1
ZBT
WG3526-16M
WG3526-32M
Note
The ramips-mt7628 target has been renamed to ramips-mt76x8, and the sunxi target has been renamed to sunxi-cortexa7. You might have to update your build scripts accordingly.
New features
Besides many smaller improvements and optimizations, we’d like to highlight the following larger new features:
OpenStreetMap-based map in config wizard
When the feature config-mode-geo-location-osm (package gluon-config-mode-geo-location-osm) is enabled, the configuration wizard will try to load an OSM-based map to allow the user to specify the node location. Loading the map requires a working internet connection, for example via WLAN (while connected to the Gluon node via Ethernet).
See the config_mode section for the site.conf configuration of this feature.
Experimental support for the Babel mesh routing protocol
As the layer-2 based routing protocol batman-adv does not scale well in large mesh networks, we are experimenting with alternatives. Babel is a promising layer-3 mesh routing protocol, which might become the recommended protocol in a future version of Gluon.
Use the feature flag mesh-babel for Babel. Note that our Babel support is still experimental and not ready for production. If you are interested in trying it out, please contact us on our mailing list or in our IRC channel.
gluon-ebtables-limit-arp enabled by default
The gluon-ebtables-limit-arp package, introduced in Gluon
2018.1, is now included by default. In case of issues, it can be removed by
adding -gluon-ebtables-limit-arp
to GLUON_SITE_PACKAGES.
Site changes
If an opkg repository for lede
was configured the key needs to be migrated
to openwrt
. lede
is ignored and without an openwrt
key the default
OpenWrt repository is used.
No other changes need to be made to site.conf or site.mk when upgrading from Gluon v2018.1.x.
Internals
We have switched from LuCI’s nixio library to the more actively developed luaposix
Known issues
Default TX power on many Ubiquiti devices is too high, correct offsets are unknown (#94)
Reducing the TX power in the Advanced Settings is recommended.
The MAC address of the WAN interface is modified even when Mesh-on-WAN is disabled (#496)
This may lead to issues in environments where a fixed MAC address is expected (like VMware when promiscuous mode is disallowed).
Inconsistent respondd API (#522)
The current API is inconsistent and will be replaced eventually. The old API will still be supported for a while.
Frequent reboots due to out-of-memory or high load due to memory pressure on weak hardware specially in larger meshes (#1243)
Optimizations in Gluon 2018.1 have significantly improved memory usage. There are still known bugs leading to unreasonably high load that we hope to solve in future releases.