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
[1]New target
[2](1, 2) AP+IBSS mode unsupported: This target is not built when GLUON_WLAN_MESH is set to ibss.

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.