If possible we should find a work-around which doesn't require patching the kernel. Carrying kernel patches which are impossible to be included upstream (for good reasons) is a burden for the project and makes maintaining our source tree the harder the more of those out-of-tree hacks exist. A single device with a new bootloader version doesn't justify adding such patches.
I suggest to downgrade U-Boot to the version from 2022 before commit 36fee2f7621 as there is no advantage of using a newer U-Boot version with OpenWrt.
Very bad decision. And you didn't see the full scale of the problem.
This issue is not limited to one device.
There is already a device from Asus on the market that has the bootloader version 2022.10 installed (the specified patch is already included):
And every day there will be more and more devices in which Uboot is installed with the specified fix (commit 36fee2f) and the presence of a common UBI partition.
At the moment, the issue is related to the following devices:
ASUS RT-AX52
ASUS RT-AX57M
ASUS RT-AX59U
ASUS TUF-AX4200
ASUS TUF-AX6000
The issue reported will likely affect the following devices:
ASUS RT-AX89X
OpenWrt One (of course there is a custom bootloader here)
mercusys,mr90x-v1
tplink,re6000xd
cellc,rtl30vw
teltonika,rutx10
teltonika,rutx50
zte,mf18a
zte,mf282plus
zte,mf286d
zte,mf287
zte,mf287plus
zte,mf287pro
zte,mf289f
platform bcm4908
There is a similar problem on the qcom platform (ipq80xx) and it is also solved by deceiving the logic of Uboot.
Example:
And here all hope is that the logic of the Uboot operation will remain the same (and there is a flaw in the logic).
Personally, I really don’t like such decisions (which are based on hope).
Hi, is it possible to download this file "asus_tuf-ax4200-ubi-cleaner.trx" somewhere? I have a similar issue with ASUS TUF-AX4200 now. I followed this steps Asus TUF AX4200 support - #241 by remittor (Using Web Interface) - everything was fine and OpenWrt 23.05.5 was running fine. Then I downloaded "asus_tuf-ax4200-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin (24.10.0-rc1)", upgraded it via LuCi and that's when the bootloop started. I also tried "ASUS Firmware Restoration tool" but it didn't help. Thanks for the help.
FYI: A rather simple method to downgrade the bootloader (and get out of the bootloop) is using the Asus firmware restoration tool. At least unless Asus comes up with a new HW rev where this might lead to a brick.
You can find the u-boot_nand_202308021202_v1004_tuf-ax4200_ddr3.trx file a bit hidden in the asuswrt/release/src-mtk-MT798X/.bin/DEFAULT in the tgz inside the zip.
Downgrading the bootloader using the restoration tool and also via TFTP worked fine here with two AX4200 that a bought a few weeks ago.
But, of course, it would be better if stock OpenWrt could work well with the newer U-Boot version / bootloader - flashing bootloaders is always a bit risky, so you have been warned.
Sure, this is only safe on devices that originally came with 1.0.0.4 bootloader / U-Boot 2022.04-rc1 or earlier. Don't try this unless you are 100% sure.
I bought a total of 3 AX4200 last month from Amazon and they still seem to ship with the 1.0.0.4 bootloader (I verified that on two of the devices, on the other one I performed an Asus firmware update before installing OpenWrt and couldn't verify the bootloader version - but very likely it was also 1.0.0.4 and the downgrade worked). Of course, this can change any time or could already have changed - only Asus would know.