Unofficial OpenWrt 25.12 (Linux 6.12) for the white SFR Neufbox 6 "Box Évolution" (NB6-SER-r0)
Integrated Wi-Fi, front LEDs, SFR and ECO buttons and sensors, none of which the last official build (23.05) supported.
The Neufbox 6 was SFR's ADSL/fibre box in the 2010s. Thousands ended up as e-waste. OpenWrt supported it up to
23.05, then dropped the whole bcm63xx target. This project moves the box to the modern bmips target and
goes further than the official port ever did:
| OpenWrt 23.05 (official, last) | neufbox6-openwrt | |
|---|---|---|
| OpenWrt / Linux | 23.05 / 5.15 | 25.12 / 6.12 |
| Security updates | ❌ end of life | ✅ follows the 25.12 branch |
| Integrated Wi-Fi | ❌ | ✅ access point, WPA2 |
| Front LEDs (Internet, VPN, System, traffic) | ❌ | ✅ with status meanings |
| SFR button | ❌ | ✅ tailnet / commercial VPN on/off |
| ECO button | ❌ | ✅ eco mode |
| Sensors (temperature, voltage) | ❌ | ✅ with graphs in LuCI |
| Compressed swap (zram), watchdog | ❌ | ✅ |
| Wi-Fi schedule, LED night mode | ❌ | ✅ |
| Gigabit switch, USB, WAN "Fibre" port | ✅ | ✅ |
BCM6362 @ 400 MHz · 64 MB RAM · 16 MB SPI NOR · Realtek RTL8367R gigabit switch · BCM6362 integrated 2.4 GHz radio · SFR LED/sensor microcontroller on I²C. Full details, GPIO map, flash layout and the microcontroller's registers: docs/HARDWARE.md.
Tested on real hardware: LED colours and order, SFR and ECO buttons, eco mode, Wi-Fi switch, sensors (51 °C, 12.2 V). Work in progress: WPS (switch pushed past "on") is detected but does not start pairing yet, because hostapd in OpenWrt 25.12 exposes no per-interface WPS call here. See docs/LEDS-BUTTONS.md.
- SFR button → short press: tailnet tunnel (Tailscale network through a WireGuard server); long press: commercial VPN. The VPN LED shows which tunnels are up. → docs/VPN.md
- ECO button → eco mode: ring LEDs dimmed, traffic LEDs off, statistics paused (optionally Wi-Fi off); kept across reboots.
- Wi-Fi switch → radio on / off; pushed further → WPS (work in progress).
More in docs/LEDS-BUTTONS.md.
Tailscale itself does not fit in 64 MB, so the box reaches your tailnet through a small WireGuard tunnel to a machine that already runs Tailscale (a NAS, for example). A second tunnel sends all traffic through a commercial provider (Mullvad, Proton VPN, NordVPN, ...). → docs/VPN.md
LuCI uses its own Neufbox theme (white pages, purple menus, red actions, always light). After login, the Home page shows the connection, the box, the VPN and the connected devices, with a photo of the box and the current state of its ring LEDs. The Neufbox menu shows both tunnels, imports a provider's WireGuard file, and sets the LEDs and eco mode. The standard bootstrap theme and overview stay available.
The BCM6362's on-chip radio never worked under OpenWrt. It now runs with the open b43 driver thanks to Alessio Ferri's 2026 work on the same SoC, Linux mainline patches, and the Neufbox's own radio calibration recovered from the SFR firmware. 2.4 GHz access point, WPA2, 802.11g rates, 0 % packet loss in tests. 5 GHz is physically absent on this board. → docs/WIFI.md
More out of 64 MB of RAM: zram compressed swap, hardware watchdog, graphs of temperature, 12 V, CPU, RAM and traffic, per-device traffic (nlbwmon), Wi-Fi schedule, LED brightness and night mode, Wake-on-LAN and a web terminal in LuCI, a devices page with per-device internet blocking and schedules, ad blocking for the whole network, and one-click updates from GitHub. → docs/EXTRAS.md
Ready-made images are on the releases page:
…-squashfs-cfe.bin for the first install, …-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin for updates, with SHA-256 checksums.
Back up the whole flash first (docs/FLASHING.md).
git clone https://github.com/JavaScript-X/neufbox6-openwrt.git
cd neufbox6-openwrt
docker build -t nb6-builder docker/
docker run --rm --network host -v "$PWD":/port:ro -v "$HOME/nb6-work":/work nb6-builder /port/scripts/build.shImages land in ~/nb6-work/openwrt/bin/targets/bmips/bcm6362/. → docs/BUILD.md
The stock CFE bootloader is kept: interrupt it on the serial console and flash
…-squashfs-cfe.bin over TFTP. → docs/FLASHING.md
sysupgrade with …-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin (LuCI or command line), settings kept.
The 2010 CFE bootloader can only unpack ~4 MB and lives in the middle of RAM, while the 6.12 kernel is 11 MB. The image therefore ships a small lzma-loader that CFE unpacks first, which then unpacks the kernel itself.
| Document | Content |
|---|---|
| docs/HARDWARE.md | board, GPIO map, flash layout, microcontroller registers |
| docs/BUILD.md | building the firmware with Docker |
| docs/FLASHING.md | first flash from CFE, updates, going back to the SFR firmware |
| docs/WIFI.md | integrated Wi-Fi: driver, firmware, calibration |
| docs/LEDS-BUTTONS.md | LEDs, buttons, sensors |
| docs/VPN.md | tailnet and commercial VPN on the SFR button |
| docs/EXTRAS.md | zram, watchdog, statistics, Wi-Fi schedule, night mode, Wake-on-LAN, terminal |
| docs/PORTING.md | how the port was done, bring-up problems, test results |
| CHANGELOG.md | changes per version |
assets/ photos, diagrams and screenshots used in this README
config/nb6.config OpenWrt target and package selection
docker/ Debian 12 build environment
docs/ hardware, build, flashing, Wi-Fi, LEDs and buttons, extras, porting notes
files/ added to the image: LED daemon and its settings, VPN and eco helpers, LuCI pages, button handlers, first-boot defaults
theme/neufbox/ LuCI theme: a style layer over bootstrap (scripts/apply-luci.sh installs it)
patches/board/ device tree, image recipe, RTL8367R RGMII fix, nb6-hwmon LED driver
patches/wifi/ BCM6362 WLAN: bcma host, b43 N-PHY r8 / radio 2057 r8, firmware, calibration
scripts/ build.sh, apply-board.sh, apply-wifi.sh
tools/ serial console, CFE, TFTP and GPIO helpers for flashing and probing
- Experimental: first flash needs a 3.3 V serial adapter; keep it for recovery.
- Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz only, 802.11g rates for now (b43's 802.11n support for this radio is unfinished).
- No ADSL/VDSL, no VoIP (closed Broadcom drivers).
- Kernel modules from the official package feed do not match this kernel: add them to
config/nb6.configand rebuild.
- Álvaro Fernández Rojas (noltari) wrote the
bmipstarget and the originalnb6-hwmonLED/sensor driver (2020). - Alessio Ferri added BCM6362 integrated WLAN support: bcma SoC host, b43 N-PHY rev 8 / radio 2057 rev 8, firmware extraction (2026).
- Miguel Gaio / Efixo did the original Neufbox OpenWrt work and the RTL8367R RGMII fix.
- The OpenWrt and Linux communities.
Third-party patches keep their original authorship and trailers. SFR firmware images and calibration files are not distributed here.
Product photos of the Neufbox 6 in assets/banner-openwrt.png, assets/leds-buttons.png, assets/hardware.png, assets/vpn.png, assets/luci-home.png and
files/www/luci-static/resources/nb6/box.png (LuCI home page): © SFR,
annotated for this project. Neufbox and SFR are trademarks of SFR; this project is not affiliated with SFR.
Brand icons in the LuCI pages (files/www/luci-static/resources/nb6/icons.js), assets/banner-openwrt.png and assets/vpn.png: Simple Icons, CC0 1.0;
the names and logos are trademarks of their owners and only identify their services.
The OpenWrt logo in assets/banner-openwrt.png and theme/neufbox/openwrt-logo.png is by the OpenWrt project, CC BY-SA 4.0
(shown in its white variant for the dark background); OpenWrt is a registered trademark of Software Freedom Conservancy.
GPL-2.0-or-later, see LICENSE.