Feature Request: Add advanced VPN/routing packages to official repo (or sync source tree)

Started by andrew

andrew

Hello Photonicat Team,
First of all, thank you for the great work on the Photonicat 2 hardware and the recent stable firmware updates!
Many users utilize the Photonicat 2 as an advanced mobile gateway and travel router. This often requires complex routing capabilities and modern tunneling protocols for secure remote access to enterprise or home infrastructures. For example, tools like AmneziaWG are frequently needed to maintain stable connections across strict ISP NATs or firewalls, along with advanced Policy-Based Routing (PBR) and SD-WAN daemons. Currently, these modern networking packages are missing from the official Photonicat repository.
We cannot build these packages ourselves because the public OpenWrt source fork on GitHub is lagging behind the latest binary releases by about 2 months. This causes kernel hash (vermagic) mismatches when trying to compile custom kmod-* packages required for these VPN interfaces.
Proposed Solutions:
Option 1 (Preferred for users): Include advanced networking packages in the official repo
Could you please add popular modern tunneling and routing packages (e.g., AmneziaWG, advanced nftables modules, and modern routing daemons) to your official automated build process? This would allow us to simply install them via opkg to manage our infrastructure securely without breaking the stable vendor environment.
Option 2 (For developers): Sync the public source tree with binary releases
If maintaining extra packages is too much overhead, please sync the public source repository with the current binary releases. This will allow the community to compile our own custom kernel modules and networking packages that are perfectly compatible with your latest firmware.
Thank you for considering this!

superlynx

Hi,
Share the common applications with official OpenWRT without depending on kernel modules may be possible, but for kernel modules, it is impossible because we have lots of changes on kernel itself.

andrew

Hi @superlynx,
Thank you for the transparent reply! That makes perfect sense regarding the heavy kernel modifications, and we completely understand why supporting custom kmod-* packages is impossible in this case.
The great news is that sharing the common userspace applications would actually solve our needs entirely! Since the Photonicat 2 has a very capable ARMv8 CPU, modern userspace network implementations work flawlessly without needing any kernel modules.
Could you please consider adding the following userspace packages for secure remote access (AmneziaWG) to your official OpenWRT feeds?

  • amneziawg-go (The Go-based userspace daemon, zero kernel dependencies).
  • amneziawg-tools (Configuration utilities. Note: the standard OpenWrt Makefile for this package might have a hard dependency on kmod-amneziawg, which simply needs to be dropped for the userspace-only build).
  • luci-app-amneziawg (Web UI management).

Having these available via a simple opkg install from your official repository would be an absolute game-changer for the community. It would provide advanced connectivity and SD-WAN capabilities out-of-the-box without touching your custom kernel.
Thanks again for your hard work and great support!

Want to reply to this topic?

Sign in to participate

Don't have an account? Sign up