But with help of simple ramdisk extroot setup, it's possible to keep at least thousands of older devices alive and well, mostly unattended like before, with at least 22.03.3, and probably for many releases to come
My use case is to continue running simple wireless APs on these TL-WA860RE v1 devices, but you can install a quite a lot of other types of functionality before you run out of RAM. luci-ssl (using WolfSSL, at least) unfortunately gets oom-killed during install.
Uses official imagebuilder: no need to maintain our own buildsystem (for now), and package feeds, ...all official packages are immediately installable
Builds a minimal "wired-network"-only image to boot, and connect: this still fits fine on probably most 4/32MB devices see configuration ... to fit into flash, we exclude firewall, wireless, and some other usual suspects (but big bad WolfSSL fits!). ... we include simple ramdisk extroot scripts: ram-root.sh, rc.local
On boot: TL-WA860RE v1 has about 13MB free RAM available, plenty of room to work with, ...rc.local detects connection via ping, downloads and installs whatever you need. ... in my case kmod-ath9k, wpad-basic-wolfssl.
If your device is rarely powered off, download-install-on-boot overhead is near-zero.
PROFIT
Let's keep electronic waste down. Let us know here if you saved a few devices with this!
Feel free to post bug reports, enhancement ideas here, or on GitHub Issues.
Firewall…what exactly do you want to use the router for?
You could also just install a complete ramfs image if you do it like this. Everything works until the power is interrupted or you reboot for some reason.
After running ram-root, if there is enough space left on the old overlay drive ( /old_root/overlay ), it is possible to save newly created config file(s) by using <tar.gz> format. So that, the router can keep config files after reboots. If you are interested please pm me.
great work - I think this can bring a lot of benefit to the community !
maybe both of you @lkraav and @faruktezcan can work together and implement this tar.gz config saving because as I understand now all config is lost on poweroff/reboot