Hello, I am fairly new to OpenWRT, but I like the freedom to set up my router as I choose. My question is that I am out of package storage (using Kong's firmware and was updating some packages). The router shows that I only had a little over 10MB (not sure of the exact amount, but it was small) or so of free storage space in the software section, but the status page shows I have 275.75MB of memory free. How come I cannot use that extra memory for packages? Thank you for any insight.
That's RAM, not flash (you can not have 275MB free flash on a device with only 128MB flash).
Does the same happen if you flash a normal image from downloads.openwrt.org?
Hi, thanks for replying. The flash vs. ram explanation makes sense. Not sure what I was thinking. I installed the generic package of openwrt and it shows I have 25.98MB of free space. Is that normal? Does OpenWRT take up over 100MB of space? I guess I thought I would have a lot more flash memory left since the router has 128MB of flash space.
Dual-firmware devices have, well, two copies of runnable firmware, along with other partitions, so 30-50 MB total per copy is typical.
https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/linksys_ea8500#flash_layout — 37 MB for root file system and overlay.
Bulk updating of packages is a bad idea for many reasons, one of the least of which is that that the old package still consumes space in the ROM and is not compressed if installed on the overlay, roughly tripling the per-package storage.
Ah ok. So it would be better to build a new image if an update is available but not in the generic rom? Have never built an image before, so I will put it on my list to do if I ever need to do it. Thanks!
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Space is one issue, the other, more critical one is when a library changes and breaks a bunch of critical things. Pretty infrequent, but definitely happens.
Yes, flashing an updated build is safest.