Rust on OpenWRT/Lede Router

help
1

Hi has anyone ever tried to run to run a rust binary on a Router which is running Openwrt or Lede?

Especially I want to know if:

  1. it is possible to even get it so small that it would fit on a less than 8MB free space device
  2. Openwrt would have everything needed (in terms of required libs etc)
  3. Rust does require lots of CPU power or anything other that would be to heavy for a router.

As Routers in terms of hardware I think about routers like the TP-Link 1043 ND (eu version)

2

I tried ripgrep on my Linksys WRT1900ACv2 with LEDE, just to see how cross-compiling would go.

  • rustup target add armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf
  • cargo build --release --target armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf

... and I get a 21MB rg binary, ouch. But most of that is actually debuginfo from libstd, so eu-strip rg got it down to 2.1MB. (edit: actually, ripgrep/Cargo.toml has [profile.release] debug = true, so it was debuginfo from everything.)

To your points:

  1. My router has around 32MB rootfs, but 2.1MB for one binary is still uncomfortably large.
  2. If you use musl as I did, then everything is static, no extra libs required. That's probably part of the size problem, but it sure makes cross-compiling easier.
  3. The compiler itself (rustc) is rather heavy for a router, but it's rare to do native compilation in these environments even with gcc, always cross compiling instead. The resulting Rust binaries should fine.
3

cross compiling would of course be needed. I asked because me I want to port parts of Lede to rust just for testing #forSience :slight_smile: I think I will report here if it works. Reasoin is that I heared that Rust should in parts be more powerfull or faster. :slight_smile:

Nice to hear it at least works. As soon as I got time I will try it myself.