// the find
coolsnowwolf/lede
Lean's LEDE source
An unofficial fork of OpenWrt's build system that keeps the LEDE name from the project that merged back into OpenWrt in 2018. It is for people who want to build their own router firmware with a chosen kernel, feed set, and board support, including Rockchip, MediaTek, Allwinner, and Loongson targets.
The build system is still OpenWrt's, so the kernel matrix (include/kernel-5.4 through kernel-6.18 are all present) and the feeds and menuconfig workflow behave the way upstream documentation describes. The board-level work is the real draw: package/boot carries bootloader and trusted-firmware builds for MediaTek, Allwinner, Rockchip and others, which is where most of the pain sits on ARM hardware. The patches are plain .patch files you can diff against upstream, so you can see exactly what was changed instead of trusting a prebuilt image.
It has drifted from upstream, and nothing in the repo says how quickly security fixes and kernel updates get pulled across. Patches such as 0006-hack-mt7987-mmc-use-4-bit-bus-width-for-eMMC.patch are workarounds carried locally rather than upstreamed, and each one is maintenance debt that rests on one maintainer. The README says the tree 'definitely compiles' and contains 'no backdoors or closed-source software that monitors or hijacks HTTPS'; that is the author's word, and a tree this size cannot be audited in an afternoon, so for a device at your network edge treat it as intent, not evidence. The first build is a long, network-heavy job that the README itself says mainland users should prepare a proxy for, and the top of the README is a Radxa hardware advertisement with Chinese-first docs, which makes it harder to evaluate for an English reader.