Sebastian Gottschall, a.k.a. "BrainSlayer", is the founder and primary maintainer of the DD-WRT project.[3] The letters "DD" in the project name are the German license-plate letters for vehicles from Dresden, where the development team lived.[4] The remainder of the name was taken from the Linksys WRT54G model router, a home router popular in 2002–2004. WRT is assumed to be a reference to 'wireless router'.
Buffalo Technology and other companies have shipped routers with factory-installed, customized versions of DD-WRT.[5][6] In January 2016, Linksys started to offer DD-WRT firmware for their routers.[7]
Replaced the Alchemy kernel with the OpenWrt kernel
23 SP 1
16 May 2006
In this service pack, much of the code was overhauled and rewritten during the development of this release; many new features were added.
23 SP 2
14 September 2006
The interface was overhauled, and some new features were added. Some additional router models are supported.
24
18 May 2008
Allows up to 16 virtual interfaces with different SSIDs and encryption protocols. It can run on some PowerPC, IXP425-based router boards, Atheros WiSOC, and X86-based systems. It can also run to some extent on routers with low flash memory (ex. WRT54Gv8 or WRT54GSv7)
24 SP 1
26 July 2008
Critical DNS security fix for an issue in dnsmasq, site survey security fixes, longer passwords, and flexible OpenVPN configurations. It can also run on additional hardware, including WRT300 v1.1, WRT310N, WRT600N, Tonze AP42X Pronghorn SBC, Ubiquiti LSX and Netgear, Belkin, and USR devices.
3.0 beta
rolling
Since 2010, the DD-WRT developers have frequently published beta builds for various routers. In January 2018 WireGuard was made available for routers with 8 MB or more flash and has been updated regularly by BrainSlayer. Due to inevitable security improvements in the Linux kernel and other packages, over such a long time, the 3.0 beta releases are now considered more stable than 24SP1 version. [15]
DD-WRT supports many different router models, both new and obsolete. The project maintains a full list of currently supported models[17] and known incompatible devices.[18]