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+Most likely rooter will run a variant/flavor of debian linux, with significant
+improvements and new software pushed upstream.
+
+### Linux Firmware Distributions
+
+These Linux-based distributions are all designed to run on very light-weight
+hardware. They use special filesystems optimized for mostly reads from a static
+archive with a few small writes to persist configuration information.
+
+* [OpenWrt](http://openwrt.org): Most popular and best maintained community
+  project. Has an entire packaging system for add-ons. Very wide hardware
+  support.
+* [DD-WRT](http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index): non-libre, not recommended
+* [Tomato](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato_(firmware)): elegant, well
+  selected feature set, pleasant UI. Vanilla version has had little recent
+  development or porting, many forked variants. 
+
+### BSD Firewall Distributions
+
+There are a series of "network appliance" firewall distributions oriented at
+business and enterprise networks. They usually run on dedicated hardware more
+powerful than commodity home routers, scaling up to multi-unit high performance
+rack mounted machines:
+
+* [pfSense](http://www.pfsense.org/): FreeBSD, forked from m0n0wall
+* [m0n0wall](http://m0n0.ch/wall/): FreeBSD, php interface
+* [Smoothwall](): commercial with "free" version
+* [zrouter](http://zrouter.org) freebsd router
+
+It's also worth noting that Juniper Network's junos router operating system is
+based on FreeBSD. Juniper equipment isn't as widespread as Cisco's iOS-based
+(not to be confused with the Apple operating system) routers, but is used for
+many of the most crucial 40Gbps+ routers at submarine fiber shore stations.
+
+### Debian/OpenWrt Hybrids
+
+A lot of people have thought about mixing the kernel, drivers, and
+configuration system from OpenWrt with the mainstream packages from Debian.
+
+* [DebianWRT](http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWRT)
+* [debwrt](http://www.debwrt.net/) is a stale project to bring debian packages
+  to the OpenWRT kernel/init system.
+
+### Genode
+
+Interesting nested resource-deterministic operating system "framework"; sort of
+like a generalization of a hypervisor. Strong ideas for minimizing the
+potential for security bugs and non-recoverable crashes. Might be appropriate
+for ensuring that "essential" network services keep running even if higher
+level apps crash or are compromised.
+
+[More thoughts
+here](http://mailman.rooter.is/pipermail/talk/2012-June/000023.html).
+
+### Other
+
+* [LibreWRT](http://librewrt.org/index.php?title=Main_Page)
+* [FreeWRT](https://www.freewrt.org/trac/)
+* [Embedded Debian](http://wiki.debian.org/Embedded_Debian),
+  [embedian](http://www.emdebian.org/)
+* [Zeroshell](http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/)
+