Gluon 2017.1

General changes

Gluon 2017.1 is the first release of Gluon based on the LEDE 17.01 branch. The kernel has been updated from 3.18.x to 4.4.x.

We’ve used the opportunity to greatly simplify the Gluon build system, removing many hacks that were required to make the build work with older OpenWrt releases.

The output/modules directory is now called output/packages and provides a replacement for the whole repository with target-specific packages of LEDE (in contrast to packages that are common for all targets of the same architecture). Another change to the build system makes it necessary that the same GLUON_RELEASE value that is used to build the images is also set for make manifest.

GCC 4.8 or newer is now required to build Gluon.

Note: There is an issue in all Gluon versions before 2016.2.6 that will lead to x86 systems losing their configuration when upgrading to Gluon 2017.1! Older Gluon versions should be upgraded to 2016.2.6 first before switching to 2017.1.

Another potential issue mostly affects virtual machines: Gluon 2017.1 images are bigger than 2016.2.x images on x86. If your virtual harddisk is based on a 2016.2.x image, it must be resized to 273MB or bigger before upgrading to Gluon 2017.1. Using qemu, the command

qemu-img resize $IMAGE 273MB

can be used to do this.

Added hardware support

ar71xx-generic

TP-Link
- RE450
- WBS210 v1.20
- WBS510 v1.20
Ubiquiti
- AirGateway LR
- AirGateway PRO
- Rocket M2/M5 Ti
- UniFi AP LR

ar71xx-tiny

The new ar71xx-tiny target has split out of ar71xx-generic; all ar71xx-generic devices with only 4MB of flash have been moved to this target.

In contrast to ar71xx-generic, ar71xx-tiny does not support opkg anymore to save some space.

TP-Link
- TL-WA730RE v1
- TL-WA7210N v2

x86-generic

The x86-kvm and x86-xen_domu targets have been removed; the x86-generic images now support these use cases as well, so no separate targets are needed anymore.

x86-geode

The new x86-geode target for hardware based on Geode CPUs has been added.

New features

Localization support has been added to the status page. In addition to German, there are English and Russian translations now (#1044)
Add support for making nodes a DNS cache for clients (#1000)

See also: DNS caching
Add L2TP via tunneldigger as an alternative VPN system (#978)

L2TP will usually give better performance than fastd as it runs in kernel space, but it does not provide encryption. Also, tunneling over IPv6 is currently unsupported by tunneldigger.

It is not possible to include both fastd and tunneldigger in the same firmware.
Add source filter package (#1015)

The new package gluon-ebtables-source-filter can be used to prevent traffic using unexpected IP addresses or packet types from entering the mesh.

See also: gluon-ebtables-source-filter

Bugfixes

Disabling batman-adv on an interface (for example when an Ethernet link is lost or before sysupgrades) could lead to a kernel crash in certain configurations (#680)
A race condition in the network setup scripts could lead to incomplete setup during boot or when interfaces were added or removed from batman-adv after Ethernet link changes (#905)

The fix also solved the long-standing issue of Ethernet-only nodes (i.e. no WLAN or VPN mesh) not booting up correctly without an Ethernet mesh link.
Some fixes in the WLAN stack of LEDE have improved the stability of the ath9k driver (#605)

Site changes

site.mk

The gluon-legacy package does not exist anymore
All gluon-luci- packages have been renamed to gluon-web-; gluon-luci-portconfig is now called gluon-web-network
The gluon-next-node package has been merged into the Gluon core and must not be specified in site.mk anymore

site.conf

The fastd_mesh_vpn configuration section has been restructured to allow sharing more options with tunneldigger. Instead of

fastd_mesh_vpn = {
  mtu = 1280,
  configurable = true,
  methods = {'salsa2012+umac'},
  groups = { ... },
  bandwidth_limit = { ... },
}

the configuration must look like this now:

mesh_vpn = {
  mtu = 1280,
  fastd = {
    configurable = true,
    methods = {'salsa2012+umac'},
    groups = { ... },
  }
  bandwidth_limit = { ... },
}

The opkg.openwrt option has been renamed to opkg.lede

i18n

The escape function has been removed as it was duplicating the existing pcdata function. All uses of escape in i18n templates must be changed to use pcdata instead.
The gluon-config-mode:altitude-label and gluon-config-mode:altitude-help translation IDs have been added to allow adjusting the texts for different kinds of altitudes that might be expected.
The optional gluon-config-mode:novpn label has been added, which will be shown in place of gluon-config-mode:pubkey when mesh VPN is disabled.

Internals

The LuCI base libraries have been replaced by a stripped-down version called “gluon-web” (#1007)

Custom packages will need to be adjusted; in particular, all uses of luci.model.uci need to be replaced with simple-uci. The Gluon documentation explains the most important changes required to migrate from LuCI to gluon-web.
respondd now listens on ff05::2:1001 in addition to ff02::2:1001 for mesh-wide operation (#984)

Eventually, ff02::2:1001 will be available for exchanging information between neighbouring nodes only; map servers should be moved to ff05::2:1001.
batman-adv has been updated to version 2017.1
Directly running make commands in the lede directory is supported now. Consequently, build targets like target/linux/clean and package/NAME/compile can’t be used in the Gluon repository root anymore.

The command make config will set up the LEDE .config in the way a normal Gluon build would, so it’s possible to build individual packages for testing and development afterwards.
Target definitions have been migrated from a Make-based format to a simpler shell-based DSL
Gluon does not pass any custom variables into the LEDE build anymore, so things like GLUONDIR, GLUON_VERSION, or GLUON_SITEDIR aren’t available to package Makefiles in Gluon 2017.1.

Instead of $(GLUONDIR)/package.mk, $(TOPDIR)/../package/gluon.mk must be included in custom packages now.

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.