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Re: WRT54G Support?



On Wednesday 15 February 2006 04:55, Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com> 
wrote about 'Re: WRT54G Support?':
> * Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <bss03@volumehost.net> [2006-02-14 21:53]:
> > > Flash flashout is probably different.  That's hard-coded so far and
> > > needs some code to auto-detect it.
> >
> > Since I don't know what this means, it's clear I need to learn a bit
> > more
>
> This is not mips specific at all.  Basically, your flash chip is
> partitioned but there's no meta-information about how it's
> partitioned.  So there's this bcm kernel file which specifies it.

Aha.  I never thought that the flash chip might not hold a partition table 
on the first sector.  If there's no information on the chip itself, I 
suppose auto-detection would just involve looking for superblocks for 
known filesystems and/or the header associated with special sections like 
the nvram, right?

> It gets tricky for me because I'd like to support more than one
> device, and they may (and do) differ in their flash layout.

I can see that.  While my personal itch is my WRT54G 1.1 (16M ram, 4M 
flash), I'd like to be able to contribute to a larger project that would 
also support my friend's WRT54G 2.0, the newer WRT54GLs, and devices from 
other manufacturers that have similar CPU/ram/flash limitations (be they 
home routers or not).

Perhaps I just need to add my efforts to the OpenWRT project.  Or, maybe 
the other projects mentioned on the list like embedian.

> Anyway, from what you say, to me it sounds as if you simply want to
> run OpenWRT and maybe mount additional storage via NFS.  But if you
> want to work on the project you described, I won't stop you. ;-)

Yeah, the main issue I have with OpenWRT at this point is the lack of 
stable 2.6.x kernel support.  But, on further investigation it looks the 
next whiterussian may have that -- or at least the development is headed 
that way, so perhaps I just need to jump into kamakaze and see if I can't 
get something running, just gotta make a JTAG cable before I try and flash 
the system.

I would like to see a mips+embeded under the debian banner, at some point, 

> > Well, I had problems with debootstrap, too, so I couldn't get a
> > debian system that was suitable to chroot into.  If I reproduce the
> > errors, I assume I can get some troubleshooters to help me through
> > it on this list, right?
>
> Sure, or I can just run debootstrap and give you a tar ball.

I'll start with the tarball provided by ths.  Thanks for the offer.

-- 
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
bss03@volumehost.net
ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy



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