Tomato (firmware)


Tomato is a family of community-developed, custom firmware for consumer-grade computer networking routers and gateways powered by Broadcom chipsets. The goal of the project is to provide users with an alternative to the firmware pre-installed on their equipment by the manufacturer, providing:
With over a decade of free open-source development invested by hundreds of contributors since its inception, there have often been multiple forks actively supported at any given time, the unique goals and implementations of each further empowering users to have options and provide feedback on how the device operates.

History

Tomato was originally released by Jonathan Zarate in 2006, using the Linux kernel and drawing extensively on the code of HyperWRT. It was targeted at many popular routers of the time, most notably the older Linksys WRT54G series, Buffalo AirStation, Asus routers and Netgear WNR3500L. His final release of the original Tomato firmware came in June 2010, by which point its popularity had grown large enough that development and support continued through the user community, resulting in a series of releases by individual users or teams of them that continues to the present day.
Fedor Kozhevnikov created a notable early mod he called TomatoUSB, which ceased development in November 2010. It was then forked by other developers and remains the nearest common ancestor to all of the forks with any recent activity. Arguably the project's largest recognition to date came when Tomato was chosen by Asus as the base used to build the firmware currently preinstalled on their entire line of home routers, ASUSWRT.
As is often seen in projects founded on volunteer effort, the Tomato ecosystem slowly became more fragmented over time and thus more vulnerable to attrition. As of 2019 there is only a single extant fork under active development: FreshTomato.

Features

Several notable features have been part of Tomato long enough to be common to all forks, among them are:

Feature comparison (cont.)

Supported routers

The Tomato by Shibby, AdvancedTomato and FreshTomato projects offer lists of supported devices on their respective websites.