I have ported the RTL8196E RTL8197D and RTL8197F SoC from Realtek to the last master of Openwrt (as of today).
The port have the necessary code for those SoCs. I used the @hackpascal initial port as a start and have ported RLX4181 and RLX5281 Lexra processors. Those are easier to port, as they have the unaligned instructions. Musl is working in lexra now...
RTL8197F uses a full 24k mips processor, so, no modification is needed in the toolchain...
For the SoCs:
All the SoC drivers are implemented and tested (gpio, pci, irq, timers, etc), for the three SoCs. One can port a router to openwrt just creating a DTS file for it (and changing the Makefiles, as any normal port for openwrt).
The problem is with network and wireless. RTL8196E based routers can use the RTL8192EE open source wifi driver from mac80211 package. Most routers that use RTL8197D SoC also use RTL8192EE for 2.4 and RTL8812 for 5... Both drivers are open source on linux kernel...
TODO:
- Network and switch driver: hackpascal has started the port for RE865X driver. Need rework for new SoCs....
- RTL8197F 2.4Ghz wireless driver: This SoC uses an internal wifi, but can be ported to the new RTW88 driver, as they use the same structs (8192EE uses this structs too, but is implemented in the old driver... May a port of 8192EE to the new driver can help too
) - Performace: The main focus right now is compatibility... We need to improve for performace....
Use the ramdisk for now... As we dont have the network driver right now, we must use the serial port to bootup... The cvimg boot can be used, but is now of much use right now...
Any help and feedback are welcome