Disable updates on devices not supporting updates

Feature Requests
1

Hi,

I have a heap of different devices running OpenWrt and spent today's afternoon and evening to updated them all from 22.x/24.x to 25.12.4.

All but one worked well: My Linksys MX4200v2 could not be upgraded through luci+upgrade image or owut. In both cases, it seemed to work, but updating never finished, LED blinking forever, and device not booting after power-off-forced reboot, but after some reboots.

reason:

as described on

some devices such as the Linksys MX4200 use a (more or less) failsafe system of two alternating images, and updates need to be done by writing a full factory binary to the other image (i.e. not the one currently booted), and toggle the active image to reboot into the other.

This worked, exactly as described on the OpenWrt web page. :grinning_face:

However, that system seems to prevent updating through sysupgrade images and owut. Both started as usual and took the device offline, but never terminated, and after forcing a reboot, the old image was still in place.

On such devices, there should be some flag that keeps luci and owut from even offering updates, if they don't work.

2

That sounds like a bug, which just needs to be fixed.

3

The Linksys dual-boot can be tricky, if the boot status variables get somehow out of sync.
But in normal conditions, it supports the normal sysupgrade just fine. (I had WRT3200ACM with dual-boot)

Normal sysupgrade in those devices does just that.

If it does not boot, one reason could be some flash problem, e.g. bad block at a crucial place, which prevents the other partition from booting properly, so that it finally reverts to the old image.

So, it might be just something in your device. Without serial connection during the sysupgrade, it may be difficult to debug.