Another year is almost gone, and I thought this year I'd have a go at my irregular "year in review" posts.
It certainly has been an... interesting... year, globally. In the sense of that old "May you live in interesting times" expression. Not gonna lie, I'm not too optimistic about what 2026 will bring us. Just on the technical side of things, I am glad that I won't be buying any new PC hardware for the coming 12-24 months, having upgraded everything over the past 12-14 months. It's wild that the RAM currently in my PC is worth more than a high end GPU.
Code branching
On the router side of things, it's been a fairly busy year overall. Following last year's introduction of the 3006 code branch, development had been split into two separate branches, 3004 and 3006. This year saw the migration of the second generation Wifi 6 devices to the 3006 codebase, although they are on a separate code branch from the Wifi 7 devices. And there's also the addition of the GT-BE19000AI, which is also on its separate (Asuswrt4) code branch. That means as of now, development is split like this:
The RT-BE58_Go is also temporarily existing on its own separate branch due to conflicts between its 32-bit SDK components and the 64-bit SDK components used by the other Wifi 7 devices. That's something I will probably need to sort out at some point in 2026. I know Gnuton is now facing similar issues with one of his own models.
All of this does make development more complicated, even while alternating development cycles between 3004 and 3006. At this time, I consider 3004 to be mostly "legacy", with only 5 models on that branch. The latest GPL merge contained very little changes, it got merged mostly because Asus mentionned it contained a number of security fixes. I expect that branch to get less development over the next year, possibly eventually going more into maintenance mode, with the focus being on fixes rather than new features. The new Traffic Monitor still got implemented on it, but there's a chance it might be the last major feature change added to that code branch.
3006 are now split as I mentionned before. Wifi 6 models are on a separate code branch, and so far Asus seems to be still actively developping for it, so these will probably still get a good share of attention over the next year.
The GT-BE19000AI is Asus' first model on the Asuswrt 4 code branch. It features the new Dashboard-based webui that was initially introduced on their ExpertWifi line of products. That model also features a new QoS/DPI engine called Ark. While I know some of Asus' plans at this point, I am not at liberty to disclose them. Let's just say you shoud expect more models to eventually use that new engine. GT Booster have also been working on some significant improvements to their engine, the latest beta that Asus had be test resolved a lot of the crashing issues that exist in the current version. Just the fact that GT Booster seem more active in fixing things compared to Trend Micro is cause for (cautious) optimism.
Model support
Following the dropping of the older WIfi 5 models has freed me some development time, which allowed me to add new models this year. That includes:
The RT-BE92U was added because it made sense in Asuswrt-Merlin's product lineup, providing Wifi 7 triband at a more reasonable price. The RT-BE58_Go was added largely for its affordability, although its popularity will determine how much effort I will devote to supporting that model. Asus believes its price will make it a popular product. We'll see.
The GT-BE19000AI was a particular beast to tackle. First of all, its new Dashboard-based UI with a completely different colour theme. Just updating the Asuswrt-Merlin unique pages to that new UI took the better part of ~2 weeks of intensive work on my part. Some pages had to be adapted for instance to properly switch between the regular darker theme and the new light theme. Expect a dark version of that new UI to appear at some point in the future, provided there are no changes in plans (you can already see hints of this dark theme throughout Asus' code).
Surprisingly, the AI Board side of thing required next to no work on my part. I only integrated some additionnal information on the Sysinfo page, and that was about it.
Major firmware changes
While I've been mentionning for a few years how Asuswrt-Merlin, after 13 years of development, is now a mature project. 2025 still introduced some major changes.
Redesigned Traffic Monitor
That's one of the biggest projects I have worked on in many years within the firmware. Essentially I completely replaced the existing Traffic Monitor pages with new pages that use the Chart.js package to provide more modern charts. This fitted with the already existing Daily and Monthly charts that I had already implemented based on Chart.js. The look is more modern and also more usable (you can even zoom in on the 24-hours charts to better visualize specific periods of time). Another reason was that I wanted to get rid of any legacy Tomato web code that was still in use. Also, a lot of attention was put in designing it in a way that it may possibly become a candidate for upstream integration. We'll have to see if it eventually happens, but in the mean time, it gave me a cleaner code base to handle any future color scheme changes. That got put to the test when adding ROG UI support of it in 3004.388.
Overall I am quite proud of the final result.
Other changes
A bit forgotten in the shadow of the Traffic Monitor, I also redesigned the Connections log page. It supports realtime filtering, LAN name resolution, and easy online querying to determine what that connected remote IP belongs to. It also supports the tracking of IPv6 connections.
Another very recent change is the decision to drop support for AiCloud. I first considered the idea last year after a few security advisories targetted that component. 2025 saw the same trend continue, with at least two (if not more) critical security updates required. At that point I made the decision to remove AiCloud from the firmware, in the wake of multiple compromised routers that ended up having their wifi radio configuration trashed, requiring advanced operations to at least regain wifi functionality. I had been advising for many years already to avoid using AiCloud due to its sketchy security track record. I decided I had enough, and simply removed AiCloud in the latest 3004 release, with the next 3006 release to also follow. Security will always be the primary concern when dealing with a router, which is your primary line of defense on your entire network.
Interestingly enough, AiCloud is currently absent from the GT-BE19000AI. I don't know if it's getting phased out in Asuswrt 4 or it just required more work to update its UI to Dashboard, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Asus are also dropping it for future models.
Plans for 2026
For now, the next couple of weeks will be very quiet. 3004.388.11 was just released, and with the Chinese New Year coming, I don't expect to be receiving updated 3006 GPLs until somewhere in late February, or March. So barring any emergency security release, don't expect much for the near future, development should pick up in speed at the end of winter.
I might be adding one or two new models over the course of the year, but they should just be variants of the existing models. The current list of supported models is pretty much at the limit that I am comfortable with.
3004.388 will continue to be supported, although fewer changes are expected to be applied to that code branch.
The year in summary
Conclusion
The project is still alive and well, after 13 years now. That's pretty old for a project of that type, with no change in developper. Happy Holidays to everyone! We've all made it through 2025, that means there's no reason we shouldn't also be able to make it through 2026, right? Right?
My thanks to the users (without you, what would be the point for me to have this hobby of mine), the community (for providing technical support).
Shout out to Asus for their continued support (in providing routers, source code, and occasional support), and also to @thiggins for providing us a home for people to exchange.
It certainly has been an... interesting... year, globally. In the sense of that old "May you live in interesting times" expression. Not gonna lie, I'm not too optimistic about what 2026 will bring us. Just on the technical side of things, I am glad that I won't be buying any new PC hardware for the coming 12-24 months, having upgraded everything over the past 12-14 months. It's wild that the RAM currently in my PC is worth more than a high end GPU.
Code branching
On the router side of things, it's been a fairly busy year overall. Following last year's introduction of the 3006 code branch, development had been split into two separate branches, 3004 and 3006. This year saw the migration of the second generation Wifi 6 devices to the 3006 codebase, although they are on a separate code branch from the Wifi 7 devices. And there's also the addition of the GT-BE19000AI, which is also on its separate (Asuswrt4) code branch. That means as of now, development is split like this:
- 3004.388 (first gen Wifi 6 devices)
- 3006.102-wifi6 (second gen WIfi 6 devices, like the Pro models)
- 3006.102/main (Wifi 7 devices)
- 3006.102/asuswrt4 (GT-BE19000AI)
The RT-BE58_Go is also temporarily existing on its own separate branch due to conflicts between its 32-bit SDK components and the 64-bit SDK components used by the other Wifi 7 devices. That's something I will probably need to sort out at some point in 2026. I know Gnuton is now facing similar issues with one of his own models.
All of this does make development more complicated, even while alternating development cycles between 3004 and 3006. At this time, I consider 3004 to be mostly "legacy", with only 5 models on that branch. The latest GPL merge contained very little changes, it got merged mostly because Asus mentionned it contained a number of security fixes. I expect that branch to get less development over the next year, possibly eventually going more into maintenance mode, with the focus being on fixes rather than new features. The new Traffic Monitor still got implemented on it, but there's a chance it might be the last major feature change added to that code branch.
3006 are now split as I mentionned before. Wifi 6 models are on a separate code branch, and so far Asus seems to be still actively developping for it, so these will probably still get a good share of attention over the next year.
The GT-BE19000AI is Asus' first model on the Asuswrt 4 code branch. It features the new Dashboard-based webui that was initially introduced on their ExpertWifi line of products. That model also features a new QoS/DPI engine called Ark. While I know some of Asus' plans at this point, I am not at liberty to disclose them. Let's just say you shoud expect more models to eventually use that new engine. GT Booster have also been working on some significant improvements to their engine, the latest beta that Asus had be test resolved a lot of the crashing issues that exist in the current version. Just the fact that GT Booster seem more active in fixing things compared to Trend Micro is cause for (cautious) optimism.
Model support
Following the dropping of the older WIfi 5 models has freed me some development time, which allowed me to add new models this year. That includes:
- RT-BE92U
- GT-BE19000AI
- RT-BE58_Go
The RT-BE92U was added because it made sense in Asuswrt-Merlin's product lineup, providing Wifi 7 triband at a more reasonable price. The RT-BE58_Go was added largely for its affordability, although its popularity will determine how much effort I will devote to supporting that model. Asus believes its price will make it a popular product. We'll see.
The GT-BE19000AI was a particular beast to tackle. First of all, its new Dashboard-based UI with a completely different colour theme. Just updating the Asuswrt-Merlin unique pages to that new UI took the better part of ~2 weeks of intensive work on my part. Some pages had to be adapted for instance to properly switch between the regular darker theme and the new light theme. Expect a dark version of that new UI to appear at some point in the future, provided there are no changes in plans (you can already see hints of this dark theme throughout Asus' code).
Surprisingly, the AI Board side of thing required next to no work on my part. I only integrated some additionnal information on the Sysinfo page, and that was about it.
Major firmware changes
While I've been mentionning for a few years how Asuswrt-Merlin, after 13 years of development, is now a mature project. 2025 still introduced some major changes.
Redesigned Traffic Monitor
That's one of the biggest projects I have worked on in many years within the firmware. Essentially I completely replaced the existing Traffic Monitor pages with new pages that use the Chart.js package to provide more modern charts. This fitted with the already existing Daily and Monthly charts that I had already implemented based on Chart.js. The look is more modern and also more usable (you can even zoom in on the 24-hours charts to better visualize specific periods of time). Another reason was that I wanted to get rid of any legacy Tomato web code that was still in use. Also, a lot of attention was put in designing it in a way that it may possibly become a candidate for upstream integration. We'll have to see if it eventually happens, but in the mean time, it gave me a cleaner code base to handle any future color scheme changes. That got put to the test when adding ROG UI support of it in 3004.388.
Overall I am quite proud of the final result.
Other changes
A bit forgotten in the shadow of the Traffic Monitor, I also redesigned the Connections log page. It supports realtime filtering, LAN name resolution, and easy online querying to determine what that connected remote IP belongs to. It also supports the tracking of IPv6 connections.
Another very recent change is the decision to drop support for AiCloud. I first considered the idea last year after a few security advisories targetted that component. 2025 saw the same trend continue, with at least two (if not more) critical security updates required. At that point I made the decision to remove AiCloud from the firmware, in the wake of multiple compromised routers that ended up having their wifi radio configuration trashed, requiring advanced operations to at least regain wifi functionality. I had been advising for many years already to avoid using AiCloud due to its sketchy security track record. I decided I had enough, and simply removed AiCloud in the latest 3004 release, with the next 3006 release to also follow. Security will always be the primary concern when dealing with a router, which is your primary line of defense on your entire network.
Interestingly enough, AiCloud is currently absent from the GT-BE19000AI. I don't know if it's getting phased out in Asuswrt 4 or it just required more work to update its UI to Dashboard, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Asus are also dropping it for future models.
Plans for 2026
For now, the next couple of weeks will be very quiet. 3004.388.11 was just released, and with the Chinese New Year coming, I don't expect to be receiving updated 3006 GPLs until somewhere in late February, or March. So barring any emergency security release, don't expect much for the near future, development should pick up in speed at the end of winter.
I might be adding one or two new models over the course of the year, but they should just be variants of the existing models. The current list of supported models is pretty much at the limit that I am comfortable with.
3004.388 will continue to be supported, although fewer changes are expected to be applied to that code branch.
The year in summary
- 3 new models
- 7 major releases, and 2 minor releases
- New 30006 branch for BCM4912 (second gen Wifi 6)
- New 3006 branch for Asuswrt 4 (GT-BE19000AI)
- One major new feature (Traffic Monitor redesign)
Conclusion
The project is still alive and well, after 13 years now. That's pretty old for a project of that type, with no change in developper. Happy Holidays to everyone! We've all made it through 2025, that means there's no reason we shouldn't also be able to make it through 2026, right? Right?
My thanks to the users (without you, what would be the point for me to have this hobby of mine), the community (for providing technical support).
Shout out to Asus for their continued support (in providing routers, source code, and occasional support), and also to @thiggins for providing us a home for people to exchange.
