Information on this page has been compiled from a number of sources in order to get an understanding of how and when we can expect the WRT300N hardware to be supported by open source projects such as OpenWRT, and DD-WRT.
There are two versions of the WRT300N unit, v1.0 which was originally released in the US and a v2.0 which was released in Europe and Australia. They differ quite a bit, as can be seen from the info below gathered from the OpenWRT wiki and OpenWRT forums.
Version 1.0
- Broadcom CFE Bootloader
- Broadcom 4704 CPU (MIPS architecture)
- Broadcom BCM4329 wireless chipset (cardbus)
- Broadcom BCM5325 FKQMG ethernet switch chipset
- Linux 2.4.20 kernel (on default linksys firmware)
- 4 MB flash, 32 MB RAM
Version 2.0
- Redboot Bootloader
- Intel IXP420 CPU (ARM architecture)
- Atheros AR5416 wireless chipset (mini-pci)
- Marvell 88E6060 ethernet switch chipset
- Linux 2.6.13 kernel (on default linksys firmware)
- 4 MB flash, 16 MB RAM
The units we have received are version 2.0. Apparently there is a DD-WRT firmware available for the US version 1.0 models which is fully functional, see this thread on the DD-WRT forums for more information.
Apart from CPU support for the Intel IXP which is quite able to be added to the OpenWRT distribution, the main problem we face is the lack of support for the Atheros wireless chipset in the version 2.0 router.
Unfortunately the latest release of the Atheros driver for FreeBSD/Linux (aka Madwifi) doesn’t support this new wireless chipset but it looks like it won’t be far off. We rely on the excellent work of Sam Leffler, a core developer of the Atheros HAL, to hopefully bring support for these new devices soon.
According to this ticket on the madwifi trac, there appears to be a lot of devices floating around that use the 5416 chipset and people who would love to see it supported by the open source driver.
More discussion about using the version 2.0 with default firmware can be found in this thread, however, since the default firmware doesn’t support a client or bridge mode we are unable to do any long distance testing at this stage.
Please discuss using the comments below, more information will be updated on this page as it comes to hand.