Gluon 2023.2

Important notes

Upgrades to v2023.2 and later releases are only supported from releases v2022.1 and later. This is due to migrations that have been removed to simplify maintenance.

Deprecation of Tunneldigger VPN

Tunneldigger is set to be removed from the Gluon base repository in the next major Gluon release. It is recommended to migrate to fastd or WireGuard. Tunneldigger will be moved to the community-packages repository and can be installed from there as an alternative.

Site changes

Image customization

GLUON_FEATURES and GLUON_PACKAGES have been replaced by a more flexible customization framework based on Lua. Feature and Package selection can be specified more granularly at both target and device level.

All site configs need to be updated. Configuration like the following must be removed from site.mk:

GLUON_FEATURES := \
    autoupdater \
    mesh-batman-adv-15 \
    mesh-vpn-fastd \
    respondd \
    status-page \
    web-advanced \
    web-wizard

GLUON_FEATURES_standard := \
    wireless-encryption-wpa3

GLUON_SITE_PACKAGES := iwinfo

It is replaced by a new file image-customization.lua with content like the following:

features({
    'autoupdater',
    'mesh-batman-adv-15',
    'mesh-vpn-fastd',
    'respondd',
    'status-page',
    'web-advanced',
    'web-wizard',
})

if not device_class('tiny') then
    features({
        'wireless-encryption-wpa3',
    })
end

packages({'iwinfo'})

Additionally, this framework also allows communities to specify which devices should or should not be built. For more information, see the image customization documentation.

Added hardware support

armsr-armv7

  • Arm

    • Arm SystemReady 32-bit (EFI) [1]

armsr-armv8

  • Arm

    • Arm SystemReady 64-bit (EFI) [1]

ath79-generic

  • AVM

    • FRITZ!Repeater 1750E

  • Sophos

    • AP100

    • AP100c

    • AP55

    • AP55c

  • TP-Link

    • Archer C60 (v1)

    • EAP225-Outdoor v3

    • TL-WR2543N/ND (v1)

ath79-mikrotik

  • MikroTik

    • wAPR-2nD (wAP R)

ipq40xx-generic

  • ZTE

    • MF289F

mediatek-filogic

  • ASUS

    • TUF-AX4200

  • Cudy

    • WR3000 (v1)

  • GL.iNet

    • GL-MT3000

  • NETGEAR

    • WAX220

  • Ubiquiti

    • Unifi 6 Plus

  • ZyXEL

    • NWA50AX Pro

mpc85xx-p1010

  • Enterasys

    • WS-AP3715i

ramips-mt7621

  • TP-Link

    • EAP615-Wall

  • Wavlink

    • WS-WN572HP3 4G

ramips-mt76x8

  • ASUS

    • RT-AX53U

  • ZyXEL

    • WSM20

Removed hardware support

ath79-generic

  • TP-Link

    • Archer C60 (v1)

    • RE355

    • RE450 (v1)

  • Ubiquiti

    • NanoBeam 5AC 19 (XC) [2]

    • NanoBeam M5 (XW) [2]

    • NanoStation Loco M2/M5 (XW) [2]

    • NanoStation M2/M5 (XW) [2]

ramips-mt7621

  • TP-Link

    • RE305

Features

TLS support

Gluon now provides HTTPS client support when the tls feature is included in the site configuration, allowing nodes to establish encrypted connections to autoupdater mirrors, opkg repositories and other HTTPS servers.

Existing site configurations that add libustream TLS packages should switch to the tls feature instead, which will always include the recommended TLS implementation as well as common CA certificates (ca-bundle).

EFI images

Gluon x86-64 images now support systems using EFI boot. The same images are still compatible with legacy MBR boot methods.

Support for CAKE with fastd

Gluon now supports CAKE as a QoS mechanism with fastd. It is automatically enabled with devices offering at least 200MB of system memory. CAKE is enabled when throughput limits are configured for the mesh-VPN.

For more information about the technical details, see the (OpenWrt wiki).

Support can be activated by including the mesh-vpn-sqm feature in the site configuration.

Docker container

The Gluon build-container is now published to the GitHub container registry. The container contains all the tools required to build Gluon images from source.

See the (container registry) for more information.

GitHub actions

Gluon build tests now run inside a Docker container built from the gluon-build Dockerfile of the same version.

Bugfixes

  • Fixed script failure when reconfiguring interface groups without an assigned role.

  • Host tools used to be built twice on first compilation.

Major changes

This release is based on the newest OpenWrt 23.05 release branch. It ships with Linux kernel 5.15.y, wireless-backports 6.1.24 and batman-adv 2023.1.

Minor changes

  • D-Link DIR-825 B1 factory images are no longer built due to size constraints. Please use a recent OpenWrt 23.05 image for factory installation and install Gluon using sysupgrade.

  • The robots.txt now prohibits crawling the status page.

  • Changed the order in which Gluon installs packages into the OpenWrt build system to favor Gluon and site packages over upstream OpenWrt packages.

  • If enough nodes are updated, the batman-adv multicast optimizations originally introduced in Gluon 2021.1 for link-local IPv6 multicast addresses will be applied within the domain to routable IPv6 multicast addresses.

  • Gluon now uses mbedtls instead of WolfSSL for hostapd and wpa-supplicant.

Known issues

  • The integration of the BATMAN_V routing algorithm is incomplete.

    • Mesh neighbors don’t appear on the status page. (#1726) Many tools have the BATMAN_IV metric hardcoded, these need to be updated to account for the new throughput metric.

    • Throughput values are not correctly acquired for different interface types. (#1728) This affects virtual interface types like bridges and VXLAN.

  • 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.

  • In configurations without VXLAN, 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).