List of router firmware projects

List of software created and maintained by people other than the manufacturer of the product. The extent of support for (and testing on) particular hardware varies from project to project.

Embedded

Notable custom-firmware projects for wireless routers. Many of these will run on various brands such as Linksys, Asus, Netgear, etc.

OpenWrt – Customizable FOSS firmware written from scratch; features a combined SquashFS/JFFS2 file system and the package manager opkg^[1] with over 3000 available packages (Linux/GPL); now merged with LEDE
- Commotion Wireless – FOSS mesh networking
- DD-WRT – Based on OpenWrt kernel since v. 23 (Dec. 2005), paid and free versions available^[2]
- Gargoyle – A free OpenWrt-based Linux distribution for a range of Broadcom and Atheros chipset based wireless routers
- LEDE – A fork of the OpenWrt project that shares many of the same goals; now merged into OpenWrt
- LibreCMC – An FSF-endorsed derivation of OpenWRT with the proprietary blobs removed^[3]
- Roofnet – A now defunct experimental 802.11 based mesh network project developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The technology developed by the Roofnet project formed the basis for the company Meraki that is now owned by Cisco.
DebWRT – Combines the Linux kernel from OpenWrt and the package management system from Debian (Linux/GPL)^[4]
HyperWRT – Early power-boosting firmware project to stay close to the official WRT54G and WRT54GS firmware but add features such as transmit power, port triggers, scripts, telnet, etc.
- Tomato – The successor to HyperWRT, features advanced QoS as well as Ajax and SVG graphs

Other

Software distributions for routers with > 5GB storage and 1GB RAM

FreeBSD

m0n0wall - m0n0wall is Abandoned but was built on FreeBSD and boots off of flash storage or CD ROM media in under 12 megabytes.
OPNsense - a fork of pfSense
pfsense - an open source firewall/router computer software distribution based on FreeBSD that can be installed on a physical computer or a virtual machine

Linux

Zeroshell – Routers and bridges with VPN, QoS, load balancing and other functions

References

↑ "OpenWrt – Wireless Freedom". OpenWrt.org. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
↑ "DD-WRT project site". DD-WRT.com. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
↑ "Free GNU/Linux distributions". GNU.org. Retrieved 2015-05-20.
↑ "DebWRT project site". DebWRT.net. Retrieved 2010-07-28.