Any plans to support WireGuard client on Raspberry Pi?

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hi folks!

TL;DR:
As far as I understand currently there is no way to set up a WireGuard client on Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ running OSMC (correction: according to comment below there is a way - you would need to build it yourself, but there is no way to install it via apt just yet). Can someone please let me know if there are any plans to introduce that to OSMC (introduce a way to install via apt)? If there are, is there a rough roadmap/timeline of when this could become reality? Thanks!

Context:
I have two Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+s in two different locations - one is running Raspbian acting as OpenVPN server, the other one is running OSMC acting as OpenVPN client (for controls within Kodi I use Brian Hornsby’s add-on).

Now, performance via OpenVPN is not the best, hence today I tried out PiVPN’s new feature that allows setting up WireGuard server on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. The setup was effortless, I connected to WireGuard from my iPhone and MacBook clients and I am very impressed with the performance. The connection is instant, WireGuard’s throughput easily reaches 100Mbit/s up/down with significantly lower latency relative to OpenVPN. Given this, I would love to be able to replace OpenVPN with WireGuard, but the last missing piece is a WireGuard client on my Raspberry Pi 3 B+ running OSMC. Is there any rough roadmap/timeline for when this could become reality?

Thanks!

2

That’s incorrect. While WireGuard doesn’t come pre-installed on OSMC, you can build it yourself, though it needs a few workarounds.

See Has anybody tried to install Wireguard? One of the workarounds is described in post #26.

3

Wireguard support will be added in the 5.6 kernel so my guess is that when another stable kernel of 5.x is out it should be fairly simple to install wireguard via apt since wireguard is already in the unstable branch of the debian repo.

4

Thanks tor the clarification. I was not aware of the possibility to build it myself. I think that I will stick with using apt for installing it once it becomes available.

5

Linux kernel 5.6 with WireGuard support has been released for some days now. You can find the official announcement here.

Now, can you please elaborate a bit more on what exactly would happen during the time until another stable kernel version would be released (usually takes 2-3 months)? Currently, OSMC is on kernel 4.19.55-6-osmc - so what would need to happen for a new kernel extension like WireGuard available on kernel 5.6 to be installable on the existing OSMC kernel via apt? As you can tell I don’t understand the nitty-gritty details just yet, hence I need some help to understand how it all works. Thanks!

6

It will take some time before Linux 5.6 is available for Raspberry Pi, as changes need to be made available for this specific SoC.

You could however build the kernel module and WG from source.

Sam

7

in short exactly what Sam said you need to build the wireguard package from scratch

this is their official instructions but it needs to be reworked from OSMC since osmc isnt ubutu and we got our own headers and kernel but it is a start so you know what your up against.

if your not that experienced messing around with compiling stuff this is pretty hard to do so backup your stuff so you easily can revert if anything goes wrong.