#ROUTEROS CHANGE SOFTWARE ID ZIP#
I don't know how old exactly ROS is (wiki says 1996?) but I distinctly remember ROS being shown to me when we were still hanging ethernet cables between apartment buildings attached to a metal wire using zip ties. Looking at what they're doing v7 is a huge leap forward internally but only some small bits are visible outside. IMHO to see what v7 is you need to look at the history
TL DR: it is stable for simpler applications but not for mission-critical applications, it will take a while to get a stable-stable (Mind you, I don't think they have ever out and out given this explanation, but the fact that ROS6 is basically running on the final kernel version that had route caching in place before it was removed, combined with the generally bad things that seem to happen if you try to disable route caching in ROS 6, strongly implies that this is the main reason we never had kernel updates in ROS 6.) If the older routing protocols and engine were not designed around route caching, we probably would be on a much more modern kernel already. This could not be done overnight, and the result was talk of a future v7 for years like it was a mythical unicorn. This prevented upgrades to a newer Linux kernel until they rewrote the entire routing engine and redesigned and rewrote all routing protocols from scratch. This dependency on the route caching feature wound up being a mistake in hindsight as route caching was removed in Linux kernel 3.6. If you try turning off route caching in ROS 6 today, a lot of different things no longer work as expected. They put route caching at the core of the entire routing engine and designed the routing protocols in such a way that the router would not even work without route caching. In ROS 6 and earlier, it seems like MikroTik had bet the bank on the route caching feature in the Linux kernel. I don't get the sense that most of the work and long delays in getting v7 ready don't necessarily have as much to do with the kernel customizations, and have more to do with the rewrite of the routing engine. More features are missing like IGMP-proxy So for your particular use case, I would recommend playing it safe and using RouterOS v6 if you can. That said, like the others, I would not suggest using v7beta in any mission critical situation. Now they just have to tackle the remaining bugs or features not fully implemented. There isn't actually that much more they have to do - the biggest missing piece was MPLS which was added in the latest beta. I think we are likely to see a first "stable" release early next year, at the rate things have been going. Previously I would try to run it and I would get spontaneous reboots every day or sometimes more often. I have a fairly complex setup at home and aside from a few things RouterOS v7 is stable enough for me at home - it only recently became stable enough with the beta5 release. But then again, not the first time the "best" hasn't won in the long run :-( If RouterOS did fade away, I think the world would have lost a bit of a shining star.