Hi everyone,
I am now able to officially announce support for three different Wifi 7 routers is currently under development, to be part of the 3006.102.1 release:
RT-BE96U
GT-BE98_PRO
GT-BE98 (by Gnuton)
View attachment 58755
Things are still too early to have any kind of ETA, even for snapshot builds, as there are a number of things still needing to be done, as this means not only new devices, but also a new technology (Wifi 7) and a new codebase (Asuswrt 3.0.0.6).
As previously indicated in the 3006 discussion thread, I will use the occasion of the move to 3006 to implement a number of changes that might not be 100% backward compatible with 3004 in terms of behaviour or third party addon compatibility. Here are some of the things I have noted down so far (so I don't forget to include them in the future changelog):
Code:
- VPN client tables changed, to integrate into Asus's SDN/Fusion layout.
/etc/iproute2/rt_tables points to the new tables, so using names is unchanged.
- Due to growing differences between stock and Merlin, going from stock to Merlin
when anything related to VPNs was already configured should ideally get a factory
default reset, as SDN indexes won't match.
(TODO: possibly investigate clearing these two in format.c?)
- NFS not supported on WIfi 7 devices (compatibility issues between nfs-utils
and the new glibc these devices use)
- Removed option dns_local_cache from Tools -> Tweak settings, to avoid issues with SDN networks
that run their own dnsmasq instances.
- OpenVPN: merged stop/start toggle with the Start with WAN into a single "Enable client" option,
to match WireGuard, and also simplify things. Enabling a client will start it, and it will also
auto start at WAN up until it gets disabled.
- dnsmasq-INDEX.conf.add, stubby-INDEX.yml.add are appended to SDN config files (INDEX = SDN index value)
- dnsmasq-sdn.postconf and stubby-sdn.postconf are executed, with first argument being the path to
the config filename for that SDN index, and the second argument is the SDN index number.
- Third party devs: chart.js was upgraded from 2.x to 3.x, which is not backward compatible.
On supported models, Asuswrt-Merlin 3006 will include support for VLAN and Guest Network Pro (SDN). VPN Director will remain Asuswrt-Merlin's method of handling VPN client routing, although Guest Network Pro rules will have a higher priority over VPNDirector rules.
I am also doing some housekeeping in the 3006 branch, such as removing the binary blobs + SDK for WIfi 5 devices, as these will never be supported by 3006 - this will speed things up a bit for us devs by reducing the amount of files to be checked out by git.
For the time being things are still being developed on a private git repo due to frequent git history cleanups. I'm planning on possibly moving the 3006 branch to the public git over the coming days, depending on how things go with the cleanup and reconciliating both repos.
Just to reiterate: don't ask for any ETA on availability, or for support for other models. 3006.102.1 will only support these three models, and we will re-evaluate things after that realease is finalized on any other potential device to support. These must be picked in collaboration with Asus as GPL code and device samples (in the case of new devices) are necessary for each individual model.
