The OpenWrt community is proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming OpenWrt 23.05 stable series. OpenWrt 23.05.0-rc1 incorporates over 3900 commits since branching the previous OpenWrt 22.03 release and has been under development for over one year.

This is just a release candidate and not the final release yet.

Download firmware images using the OpenWrt Firmware Selector:

• https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=23.05.0-rc1 Download firmware images directly from our download servers:
• https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05.0-rc1/targets/

Highlights in OpenWrt 23.05.0:

Many new devices added

OpenWrt 23.05 supports over 1750 devices. Support for over 160 new devices was added in addition to the device support by OpenWrt 22.03.

• The ipq807x target for the Qualcomm IPQ807x Wifi 6 SoCs was added

Highlights of device support

• Switched ipq40xx target to DSA
• VDSL support on AVM FRITZ!Box 7530
• Support for devices with 2.5G PHYs
  • Netgear WAX206 (MT7622)
  • Asus (TUF Gaming) AX4200 (MT7986A)
  • Netgear WAX218 (IPQ8074)
  • Xiaomi AX9000 (IPQ8074)
  • Dynalink DL-WRX36 (IPQ8074)
• Improved DSL statistics on ubus and in LuCI

Switch from wolfssl to mbedtls as default

OpenWrt switched the default cryptographic library from wolfssl to mbedtls. This library is used for HTTPS/TLS in the Webserver providing LuCI and for the cryptographic operations in hostapd. mbedtls provides security updates in their LTS branch without changing the application binary interface (ABI) of the library. wolfssl provides a stable ABI only for a very limited subset of functions. mbedtls allows us to update only mbedtls without the need to recompile and upgrade all users of mbedtls.

Core components update

Core components have the following versions in 23.05.0-rc1:

• Updated toolchain:
  • musl libc 1.2.4
  • glibc 2.37
  • gcc 12.3.0
  • binutils 2.40
• Updated Linux kernel
  • 5.15.114 for all targets
• Network:
  • hostapd master snapshot from March 2023
  • dnsmasq 2.89
  • dropbear 2022.82
• cfg80211/mac80211 from kernel 6.1.24
• System userland:
  • busybox 1.36.1

Full release notes and upgrade instructions are available at https://openwrt.org/releases/23.05/notes-23.05.0-rc1

In particular, make sure to read the regressions and known issues before upgrading: https://openwrt.org/releases/23.05/notes-23.05.0-rc1#known_issues

For a detailed list of all changes since 22.03.0, refer to https://openwrt.org/releases/23.05/changelog-23.05.0-rc1

To download the 23.05.0-rc1 images, navigate to: https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05.0-rc1/targets/ Use OpenWrt Firmware Selector to download: https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=23.05.0-rc1

As always, a big thank you goes to all our active package maintainers, testers, documenters and supporters.

Have fun!

The OpenWrt Community

To stay informed of new OpenWrt releases and security advisories, there are new channels available:

• a low-volume mailing list for important announcements: https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-announce

• a dedicated "announcements" section in the forum: https://forum.openwrt.org/c/announcements/14

• other announcement channels (such as RSS feeds) might be added in the future, they will be listed at https://openwrt.org/contact