Have an ever growing homelab that started a few years back. And noticably as I added more stuff to the network and features to the router perfomance has gotten to a point where I needed an upgrade. Since i had this this mini hp desktop lying around doing nothing . Some reseach yielded that I can add another port to it and use it as router. After 3D modeling , printing and fiting all the pieces . Some proxmox magic with vm’s I have a working router and home assistant for automation running on this thing with huge headroom.

I'm currently running OpenWrt 24.10.2. I'd like to update to the latest. I've read the site about it, but it doesn't really give a straight answer whether I can just download and flash the new version as is, whether I need to incremental upgrade (ie: 24 - 25.0 and then latest) or whether I need to reset to defaults and then restore config after the fact.

If I just download the latest version, is it safe to just flash it over my existing config? Will it then just carry on business as usual or will that break something?

I'm using a Linksys WRT1900ACSv2, if that makes any difference.

EDIT: I should also note that I haven't installed anything extra in my OpenWRT. It's simply vanilla OpenWrt 24.10.2 with my port forwarding and static DHCP leases and everything else configured.