[OpenWrt-Devel] ipq40xx: Bogus IMAGE_SIZE on asus rt-ac58u

[Adrian Schmutzler]

Hi Christian,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christian Lamparter [mailto:chunkeey at gmail.com]
> Sent: Freitag, 8. November 2019 19:46
> To: Adrian Schmutzler <mail at adrianschmutzler.de>
> Cc: openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
> Subject: Re: ipq40xx: Bogus IMAGE_SIZE on asus rt-ac58u
> 
> Hello,
> 
> On Tuesday, November 5, 2019 8:13:59 PM CET Adrian Schmutzler wrote:
> > as stated already in the comment of an earlier patch, the asus_rt-ac58u
> > on ipq40xx target has an IMAGE_SIZE of 20439364, which cannot be divided
> > by 1024 and also does not seem to match anything in DTS.
> 
> This was soo long ago, but luckily I kept some notes and files in the cold
> storage... and since it's finally snowing outside, they became accessible.
> 
> As for the relying on the DTS: Please don't in this case. The RT-AC58U uses
> UBI. So multiple volumes are stored in that UBI_DEV (or "ubi" now) partition.
> The original u-boot from ASUS kept a failsafe volume around so does works
> 
> >
> > I couldn't identify what should be the correct value in this case,
> > so maybe someone more familiar with the target could have a look and fix this
> odd value.
> 
> It was the size of the original firmware back in 2016.
> 
> You should be able to confirm this, just download the firmware called:
> "FW_RT_AC58U_30043806516.zip" and extract it.
> In the archive, there should be this file (ls -al ouput):
> "-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 20439364 Oct  4  2016 FW_RT-AC58U_3.0.0.4_380_6516-
> g6772678.trx"
> 
> This is where the IMAGE_SIZE was coming from. From what I can tell,
> the firmware web upgrade had issues with the full ~48MiB image size,
> so I opted to 1:1 copy the size of that firmware file to be on the
> safe side. (The tftp method didn't have that limitation though).
> 
> And finally: The RT-AC58U is in a bit of a dicy pickle (together with other
> some ath79 devices).  Reason being that due to the poor memory management
> of
> wifi drivers, the 128 MiB of RAM it has is not enough. When the wifis are
> activated and pushed the device runs into OOMs and regulary crashes/panics.
> So in a way, it's on the chopping block.
> 
> Regards,
> Christian
> 

Thanks for your detailed look into that.

So, to me, this sounds like one should keep it as it is until there is a real need for changes despite some cosmetic issues.
I primarily wanted to exclude a simple-to-fix error like a typo etc., as this was a rather uncommon case.

Best

Adrian
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