OpenWrt Project is a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices. Instead of trying to create a single, static firmware, OpenWrt provides a fully writable filesystem with package management. This frees you from the application selection and configuration provided by the vendor and allows you to customize the device through the use of packages to suit any application. For developers, OpenWrt is the framework to build an application without having to build a complete firmware around it; for users this means the ability for full customization, to use the device in ways never envisioned.

Sunshine!

Development

To build your own firmware you need a GNU/Linux, BSD or MacOSX system (case sensitive filesystem required). Cygwin is unsupported because of the lack of a case sensitive file system.

Requirements

You need the following tools to compile OpenWrt, the package names vary between distributions. A complete list with distribution specific packages is found in the Build System Setup documentation.

gcc binutils bzip2 flex python3 perl make find grep diff unzip gawk getopt
subversion libz-dev libc-dev rsync which

Quickstart

1. Run ./scripts/feeds update -a to obtain all the latest package definitions defined in feeds.conf / feeds.conf.default

2. Run ./scripts/feeds install -a to install symlinks for all obtained packages into package/feeds/

3. Run make menuconfig to select your preferred configuration for the toolchain, target system & firmware packages.

4. Run make to build your firmware. This will download all sources, build the cross-compile toolchain and then cross-compile the GNU/Linux kernel & all chosen applications for your target system.

License

OpenWrt is licensed under GPL-2.0