[OpenWrt-Devel] ipq806x and kernel 4.14 support / 18.06 kernel partition size?

[Hannu Nyman]

Increasing the reserved kernel space in master from 2MB to 4MB due to kernel 
4.14 for many ipq806x devices like R7800 has broken the sysupgrade 
possibility from 17.01, 18.06 or an earlier master snapshot build to the 
current master build. Same goes for the downgrade to stable branches.

The current situation where a jump between master and 18.06 (or 17.01) will 
always require using the TFTP recovery mode, is rather cumbersome for people 
who regularly build/maintain both master and stable builds. I have published 
a community build for R7800 master and stable branch for the last two years, 
and this will make my life really hard with the new stable 18.06 branch.

That makes me wonder if the kernel space reservation enlargement in the 
firmware image should be done already for 18.06 although kernel 4.9 does not 
force that, yet. It should be rather straightforward to enlarge kernel 
partition size in the 18.06 branch, but not do any other changes (so kernel 
would stay at 4.9 etc.). That would just decreases the space available for 
packages by 2 MB (like in master).

That kernel partition size change would enable a smooth jump between master 
and 18.06, and in future between 18.06 and the next release (18.12?)

The big question is if the sysupgrade break for regular users will be
* in the 17.01/18.06 change (enabling easy master/18.06/18.xx changes in 
future), or
* in the next version bump 18.06/18.xx (causing difficult master/18.06 
changes in the near future).



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