Bringing back Linksys E2100L official OpenWrt support?

For Developers
1

Lets go back a little bit in time. In the times when the OpenWrt and LEDE fork happened on april-may 2016, I don't remember the exact date, in that time, after the fork, both projects seem to have working in different repos and accepting pull request for devices in each project independently. The Linksys E2100L pull request and support got accepted in the OpenWrt project on Nov-30-2016 and snapshots were generated in that time trunk bleeding edge, in that time we could download snapshot images for the E2100L in the OpenWrt project page

E2100L OpenWrt svn commit

Github E2100L commit

OpenWrt archive, you could still find and download snapshot images made for this devices, before the merge of both Openwrt and LEDE projects

OpenWrt wiki page, it says that the device is supported.

Then the merge of both projects happen, and merged the majority of supported devices, one of the devices that could not see support in LEDE was the E2100L, for some reason this device was not merged in LEDE, and in current Openwrt trunk builds, there is no support for this device.

There are still traces in the OpenWrt code in trunk for support for the E2100L

Now that we came back to the present from our time travel, and that the both projects seems to be joining in one (OpenWrt) again, I think that can be cool that this device could be official supported again in OpenWrt.

2

Current status:

https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/e2100l

"Atheros AP81 reference design with USB & IEEE 802.11bgn. This is essentially a hardware clone of the WRT160NL with more RAM."

8/64 box, AR9130 SoC

https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt160nl -- presently images available under ar71xx/generic (unclear if these are safe to flash on the E2100L)

As a note, the ar71xx "device" is being deprecated in favor of the newer ath79 device, which supports more current kernels.

3

Hi jeff. Yes, they are in theory the same board except for the amount of RAM, but the images for the WRT160NL couldn't be flashed in the E2100L directly, people and i have tried this before in the old OpenWrt forum and this guy here in the LEDE forum, we were happy wen they add E2100L support.

Yes, I'm worried for the ar71xx port to the ath79 (for this device), because the developers became to start porting the already supported ar71xx boards to the new ath79 profile and maybe is the last chance that this device is getting support. (If some developer could correct me)I think that It could require less work add the already accepted code to the ar71xx profile and then, in the future jump to the ath79 profile, that ask to add this device directly to the ath79 profile, there are still ar71xx pull requests that got accepted

4

I'd offer what you've found to the OpenWRT mailing list, as well as your willingness to test the builds (as you may be one of the few with the physical hardware).

5

Many thanks again jeff, I don't have problem if the device need testing again, I could collaborate testing.

1 Like
6

let's try this over the ath79 thread, but yet again, this one has a realtek switch, but maybe on this one you could run tft and bootm without flashing it

but the problem could be the flash layout if you don't have a dmesg with openwrt

7

Thanks again @lucize, lets review it in the ath79 tread :grinning: