It shares a very similar architecture with the MikroTik hAP ax lite (IPQ5010) but comes with superior hardware specs like 128MB Flash, an SFP port, a USB port, and a built-in high-gain sector antenna.
I currently have this device on hand running RouterOS 7.24 and I am fully willing to test any experimental initramfs builds, provide serial boot logs (if needed), or assist developers in any testing process to bring this target to life.
Thank you for your hard work and amazing efforts on the IPQ50xx target!
I completely understand the resource constraints, but my main objective for this hardware is specifically wireless auditing and network monitoring. The built-in 15dBi 120-degree sector antenna makes the mANTBox ax 15s a perfect candidate for an outdoor monitoring node.
To make it viable within 256MB of RAM, we could theoretically strip away all unnecessary standard router services. We don't need heavy firewall rules, dnsmasq, routing daemons, or extra USB storage drivers.
If we optimize the build to include ONLY:
Core system + SSH
LuCI (for basic management)
ath11k driver with monitor mode support
And leave out almost everything else, do you think a highly customized, minimal auditing target could boot successfully in initramfs?
I am fully aware that RAM will be tightly constrained during active aircrack/airmon sessions, but I am highly motivated to test this specific use-case and provide boot logs and memory usage statistics. If anyone is willing to share a custom .config or a test build compiled with these specific packages while dropping the rest of the standard OpenWrt payload, I would deeply appreciate it!
Understood, challenge accepted! Thank you for pointing me to the "Adding a new device" developer guides.
Since I need to define the DTS, GPIO mappings for LEDs/buttons, and network interfaces for the mANTBox ax 15s, I want to start by collecting the necessary hardware database from the running stock RouterOS 7.24 system.
To structure my porting attempt correctly, could you suggest which existing IPQ50xx target device in the current OpenWrt source tree (e.g., hAP ax lite or similar) would be the best baseline/reference to copy and modify for this device?
In the meantime, I will check if I can get serial console access to capture the RouterBOOT initialization logs and share them here.
Due to warranty reasons, I cannot open the device casing to access the physical serial (UART) console. However, I have extracted the primary hardware resource data directly from RouterOS 7.24 (using the updated v7.2x unified hardware command tree) to help us identify the baseline architecture.
Here are the system outputs for the mANTBox ax 15s:
Device Hardware Tree (/system/resource/hardware/print):
Columns: LOCATION, TYPE, VENDOR
LOCATION TYPE VENDOR
0 1-0 usb Linux 5.6.3 xhci-hcd
Since I cannot use a serial console, is it possible to use MikroTik's standard Network Bootloader (RouterBOOT) via Netinstall/TFTP/tinypxe to safely test an experimental IPQ50xx initramfs build once we define the basic profile? I can easily monitor the boot behavior based on whether the device requests a DHCP/TFTP lease or falls back to RouterOS.
Quick update: The custom build finished with 100% success!
I ran a netboot test using dnsmasq on Lubuntu. As seen in the logs, the mANTBox successfully requests the bootfile and the server sends the openwrt-initramfs.itb image completely.
However, after receiving the file, the device safely falls back and boots right back into RouterOS 7. As expected, RouterBOOT natively rejects the raw .itb (FIT Image) header directly over network boot.
Since this is an IPQ50xx target, do we have a compatible intermediary u-boot.elf loader that RouterBOOT can execute first, which can then chainload our compiled .itb initramfs image?
I am ready to test the ELF loader method as soon as a compatible bootloader binary is pointed out!