In my case, I need to upgrade/update a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 (two, purchased in 2007 and 2010) and have no idea whether they are considered so old that neither Buffalo nor dd-wrt.com will eventually have updates that deal with the KRACK WPA2 vulnerability for that particular platform.
Dude I got rid of my WHR-HP-G54 like 5 years ago. They are paperweights. You haven't been safe running those in a very long time. KRACK is just the latest software flaw needing patching. You haven't been paying any attention and NOW expect firmware updates on 802.11g technology? Come on. You can't expect support for a device that isn't even physically up to snuff with modern standards. That's like owning a 32 bit computer and being angry that only 64 bit builds are getting made now.
That thing was a great router in its day, but it only has 16MB of RAM and 4MB of storage. That's not even close to capable of running modern firmware. Even a minimal openwrt build with squashfs needs more than 4MB!
As for the complete mess of the dd-wrt website, no joke, it's pretty bad. But basically two guys (kong and brainslayer) are doing ALL this work for free for the rest of us. Besides, I already showed you where to go: FTP site for the latest builds, forums for the latest news. The cruft sucks, but it's easily ignored.
Check this out: a new build released yesterday includes an EAPOL kill switch to protect unpatched clients on your LAN:
http://dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=311799So now community dd-wrt protects the router itself (e.g. if it's a client bridge) and all your attached devices. Will Buffalo have this in theirs?