An OpenWrt feed repo for Qualcomm WiFi SoC

Posted by Deepak | Mon, 04 Aug 2025 | Tagged: linux, openwrt

The CPE router development is getting more aligned towards building the router middleware with open standards and open source software, to ensure the router stack to be vendor and SoC agnostic. The preference towards community software over the custom SDKs becoming more vital and the traction to use the Vanilla or upstream router stack for SoC’s is the solution. Zilogic is also completely aligned with the same goal and looking for prospects to explore towards vendor agnostic and opensource aligned router stacks. As part of this goal we have started with the vanilla Openwrt with more production level support for customer needs. This roadmap initially would start with Qualcomm’s IPQ based WiFi SoCs considering our long term association with Qualcomm on router stack development.

Currently Openwrt has the support for the Qualcomm’s WiFi SoC family code named IPQ (Internet Processor Qualcomm), as target support namely qualcommax and qualcommbe. Openwrt main line for IPQ, has support for fewer packages and tested less when compared to QSDK Upstream (ATH), which is an official SDK for Qualcomm processors completely based on opensource drivers.

feed-ipq is an attempt from Zilogic to support vanilla Openwrt for ipq processors with packages equivalent to QSDK Upstream release. The feed-ipq would support custom make rules and recipes to add several new features, which are specific to productization of IPQ based router platforms.

As a design, feed-ipq would be a shim-layer around Openwrt and would fetch the complete IPQ specific source code from the Code Linaro repository, where the opensource software from Qualcomm are released and maintained.

Features and Roadmap

On a wider roadmap, feed-ipq would be supporting below features in regular milestones

  • Building Vanilla Openwrt for IPQ processors with all supported drivers for IPQ.

  • Making it compatible to the Openwrt based OSes like prplOS, IOWRT and OpenWiFi

  • Testing the feed-ipq and ensuring it functionally meets the standard router requirements.

  • Adding custom board variants based on IPQ SoCs.

  • Customizing the partition scheme, calibration data, FEM configurations as per the production need.

  • Creating a combined ITB image comprising all of the boot components to facilitate full system upgrade.

  • Custom recipes to build the signed and encrypted images for the secured boot.

  • Custom sysupgrade component to verify and upgrade the full system.

  • Custom scripts to support debug mode to collect more logs of the components for detailed log analysis.

  • Ramoops and console logging for more log collection to support post-failure analysis.

  • Crash dump and core dump collection for remote analysis of the target.

  • feed-ipq to be maintained abreast with the periodic releases of QSDK Upstream.

  • Custom features developed part of the feed-ipq, which could not be upstreamed to the mainline, can be maintained here until there is a need in the community.

  • Few features may depend on the Qualcomm’s customer specific releases, which we would handle based on the customer requirements.

feed-ipq repository would also stay as a staging directory until some of the IPQ specific recipes are getting mainlined. Technical details on feed-ipq is available in the article Openwrt for IPQ

Conclusion

To utilize feed-ipq in your products, and for any services related to OpenWrt, Wireless Router Operating Systems, specific customization services like fast boot, performance improvement and security improvements on Linux, you can reach us through sales@zilogic.com.