I am looking for a router, and OpenWRT came up. I was looking at their table of hardware and the ASUS RT-AC3100 seemed like a good option, as its cheap used, (~$40 USD) and supported by the latest OpenWRT version.
Thing is, its EOL, per Asus. Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
Is there a way to see or estimate when a router will no longer work on OpenWRT?
Maybe the OpenWRT One?
I’ve considered this but only 1 Ethernet port requires a switch, so I’m not really sure
Unmanaged switches are cheap and useful. Managed are better but not everyone has the need for them
Just because Asus has EoL’d doesn’t mean openwrt will drop support. In fact, you can get these routers for cheap now and breathe new life into them.
With openwrt your router will outlive you. You might have to take it out with a shotgun. I have a 20-year-old dsl router that the isp gave us for free and it will not die.
There are probably people reading this who are younger than this router, and don’t remember DSL… and yet this beast can absolutely run openwrt 23.xx.
https://openwrt.org/toh/actiontec/gt784wnv
I say “can” because I retired mine to the box a few years ago, running 19.xx and working like new. (Just that 100Mbps is too slow.)
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point PoE Power over Ethernet VPN Virtual Private Network
[Thread #984 for this comm, first seen 6th Jan 2026, 02:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I’m going to be a little pedantic, for the sake of completeness, because I very much appreciate and value what Decronym bit did here and want it to cover any gaps that may arise (especially for newcomers).
AP doesn’t necessarily have to be wifi or wireless; I’ve used many hardwired APs. WAP stands for wireless access point, though it’s almost always shorthanded to AP (more so now, maybe, because of a dumbass song with the same name).
Thing is, its EOL, per Asus. Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
OpenWRT tends to support devices longer and better than the OEM, but it depends on the popularity of the chipset inside the router.
Many different routers by different companies are almost identical internally, because they use the same chipset. Eg the RT-AC3100 seems to be a bcm53xx variant, of which OpenWRT supports a few dozen products. Support will probably only be dropped when every single one of those devices goes EOL and several years pass (ie no people left contributing/maintaining it and the builds break somehow).
Router chipsets can be very long lived. Many new devices use decade old chipset designs. Some chipset families have almost identical chips released every few years with slightly different peripherals, clocks & pinouts; but are supported by the same kernel drivers.
(This is all much better than the world of mobile phone hardware support. Maybe it’s because of different market pressures? Not to mention you don’t have a monopoly that benefits from keeping the hardware fractured. Imagine if people could make a competitor to Android that works across most devices out there)
Rule of thumb for OpenWRT:
In general for consumer routers, Broadcom-based ones like the one posted require a lot of work and hacking to port and maintain. If they’re even working with OpenWRT at all it can be quite dicey and troblesome if you are not very lucky.
In comparison, Mediatek-based models tend to be better supported and smoother sailing.
I haven’t seen much of Qualcomm but I’d guess they fall somewhere closer to Broadcom.
So no, I don’t think it’s a good pick. If OP got it handed down for free it might be worth a shot but I would buy something else if the purpose is to run OpenWRT or any Linux or BSD on it.
Source: Installed OpenWRT on many different devices over the years, including one with the same chipset
Yes, OpenWRT lasts way longer. Main thing that ends support is hardware requirements. My old devices with only a few megabytes of memory got dropped eventually. Not because of the chipset, a modern OpenWRT would just not fit any longer. I rarely see other reasons for them to discontinue updates.
Check out GL.iNet products. They’re all based on OpenWrt with a more beginner-friendly GUI on top. (LuCi can be installed via a few clicks.) And very affordable. Some can be flashed to vanilla OpenWrt as well.
GL.Inet products that use Mediatek chipsets are great since you can usually flash standard OpenWRT on them. I would avoid routers with different chipsets since they are unlikely to get proper support.
(Though I can’t say that my MT-6000 is cheap, but it is an extremely capable router. That is top of the line though, they have cheaper stuff.)
Looking at you Flint 3 DOWNGRADE!!!
As an alternative to openwrt rather than getting consumer based hardware and flashing. Take a look at mikrotik I’ve been running a $40 wired router for years and it has tons of advanced features that are commercial grade.
They still push out firmware updates for devices first releases decades ago (eg rb433 from 2008. Wireless performance has improved but it’s still not quite there yet, mostly in the area of signal strength. Personally I don’t mind that with the ability to configure things in minute detail (if you want to). Superb hardware reliability and just all round great.
Looking up the router, it was allegedly produced in 2024, according to the OpenWRT wiki. Barring any outliers, OpenWRT generally only sunsets hardware when a new version has higher hardware requirements than is provided by a device. The supported devices page lists out the hard requirements as well as recommendations. Currently 8 MiB flash storage is the minimum, with 16+ MiB recommended (for additional functions, user addons, etc.). 64 MiB is the minimum RAM target, with 128+ MiB recommended. According to the router’s wiki page, your chosen router exceeds both recommended requirements. Overall, the router should be suitable for a good while not barring any severe hardware or bootloader-level exploitable vulnerabilities are discovered with the device. There is no explicit date of when your router will no longer be supported, but you can check the history of the supported devices page to get the general trend of when OpenWRT bumps up the minimum requirements. For instance, it was just 4/8+ MiB flash storage and 32/64+ MiB RAM in early 2017.
Depending on what you want to do with the router, getting something with more RAM and a stronger CPU could be beneficial for various tasks (e.g. adblock-fast, cake sqm, etc.). Definitely do research on what you want your router to do though before choosing to go with higher specs or not.
FWIW I bought an N100 mini pc with 2 nics for ~100eur and use it as an openwrt router. It’s so easy and simple IDK why more people don’t recommend it.
How is x86 openwrt? I’ve been on opnsense but my APs are openwrt and maybe I’m remembering wrong after a long time of not touching the management page but I could have sworn it used to detail what rate cables connect at and it doesn’t seem to any more without unrememberable shell commands, and at some point my lan domains stopped working, among other minor annoyances I could also swear are new since my absence.
Pretty much the same as any other incarnation of openwrt, just without a lot of the compatibility headaches and weird installation processes that you typically have with other architectures. It’s just install and forget pretty much.
As for the link speed, you can just
cat /sys/class/net/eth*/speedas with any other linux system. Not sure how your configurations stopped working or broke, maybe your storage got corrupted or something? Hard to tell, but I doubt openwrt caused it on its own, it sounds new to me.
