This an exciting release for me. A few years ago, I bought a vastly overpowered (at least, for router purposes) x86 box with a bunch of ethernet interfaces, with the idea that I'd run OpenWRT on it and then deploy a few containers to it for extra services. Until this release, though, many of the kernel options needed to support containers weren't enabled on OpenWRT's default kernel. It was possible to pull off my original plan by doing a custom build, and the OpenWRT build system makes this very easy, but it's even easier to be able to just grab a pre-built release.
I've run OpenWRT in a VM before as a gateway to a set of other VMs on the host, but I'm skeptical about the performance implications of running it in a VM for my primary internet connection.
In general, I find VMs a huge pain to manage compared to containers. I don't run any VMs at home anymore, aside from firing a temporary one up from time to time to try out some random ISO.
vm performance is excellent, especially if you passthrough the nic. Use libvirt + kvm. It's pretty simple to use vms on standard distros. virt-manager is a good gui.
It’s still a whole other kernel and disk image to worry about, passthrough to get set up, etc. For the stuff I run at home, I want things to be as simple and and automated and reproducible and hands-off as possible. VMs feel too much like work. If I never have to edit libvirt XML again, I might die happy.
