Howdy folks,
This one took longer than usual, but it's finally ready for public release. While strictly speaking there is no new feature in this version, it's still one of the most important releases in a long time (and the one that required the largest amount of work for me).
This new release is based on the 372 code. Note that this is an early version of the 372 code and NOT the final 372 code. If Asus releases any new FW based on 372, it will most likely use more up-to-date code.
The highlights:
Support for RT-AC56U
First, I'd like to thank Asus for providing me with an early sample of this router for development purposes, and for their support in making it possible for Asuswrt-Merlin to be available so soon. I find the RT-AC56U a very exciting router for custom firmware stuff, not because of its wireless performance (it has slightly shorter coverage, and is only a dual-stream router). but because this is a major step forward in terms of router architecture, with the switch to a dual-core processor, and to the ARM platform (similar to what is used in the majority of today's Android smartphones). The router is still difficult to find, but expect them to become more widely available over the coming weeks.
The dual-core CPU won't help with wireless performance, but it greatly enhances Samba sharing (a single core USB 3.0 router typically caps at 30 MB/s - the RT-AC56U can easily reach 50 MB/s over gigabit Ethernet!), and OpenVPN performance (I measured close to three times the throughput vs an RT-AC66U).
Nearly every existing Asuswrt-Merlin feature has been implemented on this router. A few exceptions:
- No Entware or Optware support (these software repositories are built for the MIPS architecture, and would require a complete recompile to work on the ARM architecture)
- The Ethernet Port status table can't report the last seen MACs (just implementing support for port state required quite a bit of low-level changes to the robocfg tool, which wasn't designed for the Ethernet switch used by this router).
Everything else is there: JFFS, OpenVPN, Stealth Mode (including the switch port LEDs at the back).
Of course since this is the first public release for this router, there might still be some issues coming up. But for the past week the RT-AC56U has become my primary router at home, so it should be fairly solid after getting two months of development time on it.
Downgraded RT-N66U to SDK 5.100
This one was quite tricky to pull off. Asus didn't just upgrade the wireless driver with FW 354, but the whole Broadcom SDK. This means downgrading to the more stable 5.100 wireless driver isn't as simple as copying three files - various other bits had to be removed. I had to try three different approach to find one that worked - in the end I had to surgically remove some specific bits of code/binary blobs.
So here it is: the RT-N66U 3.0.0.4.372.30 FW uses the older 270 drivers, fixing the stability issues. Note that this means that we lose the PPPoE HW acceleration that came with the newer CTF module. I am unsure if the XBox fix still works or not. But I believe far more users will benefit from the stable wireless driver. For the rest, build 354.29 Beta remains available.
Saved backups with OpenVPN keys can now be restored
There was a long-standing bug that was finally tracked down and fixed. If you use OpenVPN and keep a backup of your settings, you *must* go to the OpenVPN Keys page, click on Apply to re-save your keys (they will be slightly re-encoded), then make a new backup of your settings. This
only affects people who are using OpenVPN, and upgrading from a version older than 372.30.
Note 1: saved settings from older FW versions, if you use OpenVPN, can not be safely restored on any FW version (due to that bug that was just fixed)
Note 2: If you downgrade FW, you will need to go to the OpenVPN keys page, and clean up the keys manually (simply do a search & replace in a text editor, replacing the ">" character with an end of line, then pasting them back).
The usual fixes and tweaks
Various other issues were fixed/tweaked, such as handling device with 15-chars long names, JFFS2 getting reformatted on reboots if you had just reformatted it, etc... The details are in the Changelog.
As usual, my thanks to all the users who provided feedback, bug reports, helped answer questions from other users on these forums, or donated through Paypal - as always, this is very appreciated!