Adding OpenWrt support for Motorola MD1600 ADSL Modem Router

Hi, contacted Motorola about getting their GPL source code for the MD1600, took them a couple months, but they finally got around to it yesterday and uploaded it here - MD1600 Download.

My hopes are to create an OpenWRT port for the device, given they've included all the necessary drivers and software to create working stock image (from what i can see). Now I've no experience with doing these sorts of things, the most I've done is flashing android ROMS and recovery images, and what experience i have with linux is from working with servers (I'm a full stack dev), as well my own playing around with WSL, dual boots and VM's (Ubuntu, Kali, Red Hat, CentOS).

Was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction to getting started on porting, or even aid me in such a venture. My own searches has taken me here:

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/start

https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/hardware/soc/soc.broadcom.bcm63xx

Which is all kind of overwhelming for a noob like me.

Appreciate the reply. For new comers it would help to who are not familiar with the jargons used (like me), it would help to start at Adding new platform support. Took a while of me being confused with "what exactly defines a platform? how do I know what what platform i'm on? how do i figure this out? patches? where do i get these from the source files?".

It does feel overwhelming unless you start at the very bottom with the basic concepts (which is what i was looking for). But I do appreciate you pointing me towards those links.

I don't quite understand why you're looking for adding a new platform, that aspect has already been done for you.

What you're looking for, is indeed adding a new device to an existent platform (or more specifically, "target" in OpenWrt lingo) - and maybe extend the target as a whole with missing drivers. The later I wouldn't be too hopeful about, based on prior experience with Broadcom in general I seriously doubt that you will find the necessary drivers to support modem- and wireless functionality of your device in the provided tarball. If you do, it's probably linking in a (kernel dependent-) binary object, which won't get you much further. If Motorola really 'messed up' and accidentally leaked real source code, that still wouldn't mean that OpenWrt could take proprietary code without a clear and obvious re-distributable license to do so (and explicitly attached). Maybe I'm wrong, but I would be surprised if I were.

Adding support for a new device isn't trivial and finding documentation in the wiki is actually the least of your worries. Personally I wouldn't even look at the wiki for that at all, and rather check the source and the commit history that added similar devices myself, because that will be a lot more useful than rather generic prose about it - and because that's exactly the kind of experience you'll have to learn in order to succeed.

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Obviously the wiki articles about it are still very valuable, as a first contact address avoiding having to go into details every time someone asks about it - but it certainly won't help you one iota to actually get started by the very nature of it, no wiki article ever could.

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