So I've since been able to successfully build an image (whether or not it'll work is TBD!) I've also got UART access over serial so my next step will be to boot an initramfs image like you suggested.
EDIT: curiosity got the best of my and pulled the trigger on trying the initramfs install with thankfully some success! Answered my own questions below.
Thankfully the initramfs build worked and I was able to boot into openwrt and log into Luci. I had to step out so I couldn’t test to see what worked or didn’t but I didn’t see any alrming errors in the bootlog. Am I safe to flash the sysupgrade image and continue testing?
A couple of questions regarding that:
-
the ramdisk image that was built is in a .itb format, is this the correct format?
Yes. -
the linux machine that built and is seving the initramfs image is in another room so I have the router connected to my network via ethernet. I did set the server IP and assigned an IP to the router with setenv serverip and ipaddr respectively, is there any reason for this setup not to work? I can definitely relocate to the other room if need be but am hoping to keep working where I'm setup. I was able to ping the server from the uboot console
I ended up having trouble getting the tftp server configured on the Linux machine so I copied the images onto a flash drive and ran tftp64 on the windows machine where I’m using the serial console. To answer the initial question, yup this works just fine. -
I'm having trouble finding instructions on the actual loading/booting commands. this community post speculates
tftpboot Filenamefollowed bybootwhere as the generic flashing over serial writeup (which seems like it's geared towards flashing an image over tftp), gets in the details of writing to specific memory addresses.
Does the first method seem correct to you? or could you point me to a good resource please?
The first method worked.
Anticipating that the second method will be required, I pasted the mtd map below.
I need to figure out which is the correct partition, but to find the memory address would I start at address 0 and add the sizes (in hex?) until I reach the mtd partition of interest?
dev: size erasesize name
mtd0: 00040000 00010000 "0:SBL1"
mtd1: 00020000 00010000 "0:MIBIB"
mtd2: 00060000 00010000 "0:QSEE"
mtd3: 00010000 00010000 "0:CDT"
mtd4: 00010000 00010000 "0:DDRPARAMS"
mtd5: 00010000 00010000 "0:APPSBLENV"
mtd6: 00080000 00010000 "0:APPSBL"
mtd7: 00010000 00010000 "0:ART"
mtd8: 00010000 00010000 "config"
mtd9: 00010000 00010000 "pot"
mtd10: 00010000 00010000 "dnidata"
mtd11: 00e10000 00010000 "0:HLOS"
mtd12: 00aa0000 00010000 "rootfs"
mtd13: 00070000 00010000 "rootfs_data"
mtd14: 00040000 00010000 "language"