CarrierWrt

CarrierWrt is an OpenWrt overlay that simplifies development of commercial products by focusing on aspects that are important to equipment vendors and their customers:

• CarrierWrt's build configuration is versioned, i.e. there is no "menuconfig" build target. If you build from the same source you will (or should) end up with the same firmware.

• CarrierWrt is designed to produce complete firmware that can be put through QA and is usable out of the box. While it is possible to postinstall packages the end-user should not have to. In a sense you can think of CarrierWrt as the cathedral built on top of OpenWrt, the bazar.

• OpenWrt traditionally stays very close to the bleeding edge of open source, even on the release branches (e.g. backfire). CarrierWrt is much more conservatively maintained. We try to fix bugs with minimal patches instead of updating to the latest snapshots.

• Proprietary closed source software is usually not welcomed into open source respositories with open arms. Nevertheless equipment vendors often need to add some bells and whistles to differentiate their products. CarrierWrt is designed to make it easy to integrate proprietary software, and even comes with some functionality essential to carrier customers pre-integrated.

In short, if you want to build a commercial product based on OpenWrt you should fork CarrierWrt! It embodies wisdom from years of experience developing commercial products based on OpenWrt, and will serve as an excellent starting point for yours.

Firmware Images

Pre-built firmware images are available at http://carrierwrt.org/download. Directories correspond to git tags, with latest and stable symlinks for convenience.

Functionality

CarrierWrt comes with some additional functionality not found in (standard builds of) OpenWrt.

Management

EasyCwmp is a (rudimentary) open source implementation of TR-069 CPE WAN Management Protocol (CWMP) pre-integrated in rgw and ap CarrierWrt product variants. ACS discovery through DHCP Option 43 is supported. Interoperability with GenieACS has been verified.

Carrier Wi-Fi

CarrierWrt comes with Anyfi.net software pre-integrated, ensuring compatibility with Anyfi Networks' Carrier Wi-Fi System. This lets operators build completely seamless "homespot" user experiences with end-to-end security. It also enables seamless integration of equipment running CarrierWrt into existing carrier Wi-Fi solutions, e.g. for mobile Wi-Fi offload or traditional hotspot services.

Community Edition of Anyfi Networks' Carrier Wi-Fi System is freely available. This version is fully functional, but restricted to a maximum of 100 access point radios.

Getting Started

You need to have installed git, svn, gcc, g++, binutils, patch, bzip2, flex, make, gettext, pkg-config, unzip, libz-dev, libncurses-dev, gawk and libc headers. For example, on a Debian based system run the command:

  apt-get install -y git subversion gcc g++ binutils patch bzip2 flex make \
                     gettext pkg-config unzip libz-dev libncurses-dev gawk \
                     gcc-multilib

Then:

1. git clone https://github.com/carrierwrt/carrierwrt.git

2. cd carrierwrt && make

Basic build configuration is in config.mk. Functionality and default settings are controlled through what we call product profiles and customizations (in products/*/Makefile).

Next step is to fork this repository and get started making changes!

Copyright and Licensing

The CarrierWrt build system overlay is licensed under a highly permissive "1-clause BSD license". See the LICENSE file for more details.

The OpenWrt build system, as well as the software built by the build system, is licensed separately under their own licenses.