Improved performance on old Pis

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© Lead Image © besjunior, 123RF.com

© Lead Image © besjunior, 123RF.com

Article from Issue 283/2024
Author(s):

Light open source router firmware breathes new life into your old Raspberry Pi.

The OpenWrt project offers an open source networking-centric operating system that supports almost 1,000 different devices [1], mostly networking equipment (e.g., D-Link and Netgear routers), although other hardware such as Raspberry Pis, BeagleBone modules, and even old X86 computers can be used.

OpenWrt has an extremely small footprint, and it is designed to operate with as little as 8MB of flash RAM and 64MB of RAM. Because of these minimal hardware requirements, OpenWrt can be ideal for older Raspberry Pi hardware with speed and memory usage issues.

I was a little apprehensive when I saw that the OpenWrt Raspberry Pi image was only 185MB (compared with 520MB for the Raspberry Pi OS Lite image), but after everything loaded, I was happily surprised with its great system performance and quick bootup time.

[...]

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