Asus gebruikt voor zijn nieuwere routers, zoals de RT-AC87 en RT-AC5300, van Tomato afgeleide firmware met de naam Asuswrt. Deze firmware is, op enkele drivers na, opensource, waarbij de gesloten binaries wel meegeleverd worden. Asuswrt-merlin is op zijn beurt een aangepaste versie van de originele firmware van Asus. Het bevat onder meer bugfixes en kleine verbeteringen, maar probeert toch dicht bij het origineel te blijven, zodat het mogelijk blijft om nieuwe features die Asus introduceert, toe te voegen aan de code. De complete changelog voor versie 384.15 is op deze pagina te vinden, dit zijn in het kort de hoogtepunten:
Asuswrt-Merlin 384.15 (and 384.13_4) are now availableWhile these two releases contain few changes, the focus was on implementing a standard way for third party developers to implement and manage new features. This is accomplished in three ways:
- Third party devs can now more easily add new pages to the webui (up to a maximum of 10 pages total are supported by the firmware), in any of the desired tabs
- There is a settings repository, separate from nvram, which allows devs to add and store new settings, both from shell script and web pages
- The Asuswrt-Merlin Terminal Menu (amtm) by thelonelycoder has been integrated in the firmware image, allowing users to more easily install/remove most popular addons, like Diversion or Skynet.
The documentation to the official addons API can be found on the Wiki. The documentation for AMTM can be found here.
Also note that due to the increasing differences between the 382 code used by the RT-AC87U and RT-AC3200 and this firmware's 384 code, these two models are currently basically on "life support". The 384.13_4 version is being released simultaneously for these two models, implementing the most important changes of 384.15 to try to at least keep them in sync in terms of important features (addons and amtm). The future for these two models is currently up in the air, and will depend on how things will evolve in the future regarding Asus's own firmware releases. Unless they eventually bring these two models on the same code base as their newer models, I will eventually have to drop support for these two models. For now, these two models will stay on the last compatible code (384.13_x), and will mostly receive just general fixes.
The highlights of the changes in this release:
- Implemented addon API for third party developers, allowing to add new webui pages, and interact with settings.
- New wan-event script, which will replace the (deprecated) wan-start script. This script will obtain the WAN unit as first parameter (0 for first, 1 for second), and the event type as the second parameter. Current event types are: init, connecting, connected, disconnected, stopped, disabled and stopping. Event type "connected" will match the former wan-start script event. Wan-start will be removed in a future release.
- Implemented amtm. This shell script allows you to easily install/unstall various popular addons. The officially supported Entware installation method is also through amtm now - running entware-setup.sh will simply launch amtm. To launch amtm, please login over ssh, and type "amtm".
- Merged GPL 384_7756 for RT-AX88U (which adds OFDMA and WPA3 support), and 385_10002 for other models (except RT-AC87U and RT-AC3200). Note that there wasn't much changes in 385_10002 vs 384_81351. A few fixes were also backported from the (newer) 384_81981.
- Updated components: odhcp6c (1.1-97-ge199804), curl (7.67), openssl-1.0 (1.0.2u) and dnsmasq (2.80-114-ge40d8be).
- Improvements to httpd connection handling. @themiron pushed a number of fixes to the httpd daemon in how it handles browser connections, which makes the webui run a bit smoother - in my own tests I no longer encounter half-loaded pages. that would sometime occur when using https.
Please read the changelog for the detailed list of changes.