Advice on RT3200 upgrade from old snapshot

[ctb170]

Thanks in advance!

I like to hear your advice/opinion on how to proceed in my current situation. I have a RT3200 and is my first time using OpenWRT. Back in spring 2022, I installed the snapshot release for RT3200. Things got busy and I have not been following, but now I am here seeking on advice on what I can do to upgrade to something more current (mainline version or newer snapshot) so I can start using some packages.

I am currently on:

• SNAPSHOT r19090-34fd5e325a (Kernel Version 5.10.103)
• already UBI converted

1. I like to get to the main "stable" v23. Given the old snapshot, how should I upgrade my firmware to the latest? Should I use a factory or upgrade image? Or should I use dangowrt's installer or upgrade from ssh command? I will restore any custom configuration manually. I am not sure I want to follow the v24 snapshots and then switch to main "stable" v24 whenever it releases.
2. I just want to validate what I am seeing for the 2nd question. During my assessment, I noticed that my UBI partitions do not have factory partition. Does this mean I am not able to restore to stock? This doesn't bother me, but I just want to confirm if that is the case.

I also been reading the megathread in the developer topic for RT3200 and am really impressed by the community effort to root out and resolve the OKD issue.

[grauerfuchs]

1: With a snapshot that old, you should be able to simply use the sysupgrade file for 23.x without issue. I agree that manual reconfiguration is probably the best way to go, especially coming from a snapshot version. After all, there could be unexpected and incompatible entries in one or more of the config files.

2: You'll find the 'factory' partition for your router is present as an mtdblock device instead. The first support through 23.x UBI layout has four mtdblock partitions: bl2, fip, factory, and ubi. UBI for this layout contains the ubootenv, ubootenv2, recovery, fit, rootfs_data, and sometimes boot_backup. As for restoring to stock original firmware, that depends more on the contents of boot_backup (within ubi). Even if you do have and can offload the partition backups stored within the boot_backup volume, you may have only a partial set of original partitions and so recovering to stock (which was already a difficult process) would not give you a fully viable result.

I definitely recommend backing up the mtdblock device labeled 'factory' before you do the upgrade. Although there shouldn't be any problem upgrading, that one partition is the only thing that is both unique to your router and it is absolutely necessary to for your router to work properly. The rest of the data can be replaced by versions present on the OpenWRT firmware downloads pages.

[ctb170]

Thanks for these helpful tips! I was curious how this router worked without the unique to the router bits without the "factory" partition. Sure enough I see it in the mtdblocks...

# cat /proc/mtd
dev:    size   erasesize  name
mtd0: 00080000 00020000 "bl2"
mtd1: 00140000 00020000 "fip"
mtd2: 00100000 00020000 "factory"
mtd3: 07d00000 00020000 "ubi"

Where as I was only looking at the ubinfo listing that are showing:

Volume ID:   0 (on ubi0)
Name:        ubootenv
-----------------------------------
Volume ID:   1 (on ubi0)
Name:        ubootenv2
-----------------------------------
Volume ID:   2 (on ubi0)
Name:        recovery
-----------------------------------
Volume ID:   3 (on ubi0)
Name:        boot_backup
-----------------------------------
Volume ID:   4 (on ubi0)
Name:        fit
-----------------------------------
Volume ID:   5 (on ubi0)
Name:        rootfs_data

[ctb170]

With your guidance, I was able to backup the factory partition, and completed the upgrade.

I can better understand the notes in the device wiki and future ubi bootloader and partition changes that the UBI installer makes (not needed to upgrade to 23.05 but incase I wanted to do go to a v24 snapshot).