after reading manyposts, pull requests and wiki pages, i learned that the vDSL vectoring instabilities are maybe solved with an addition which made its way into 22.03.3.
First of all, thank you all so much for working on this, i also believe that this is a very valuable addition to the ecosystem for lantiq acceptance!
Now i wanted to try the 22.03.3 release on my TP-Link TD-W9980B and installed the build for the W8980 with a wipe of the config (since it switched from swconfig to DSA).
Then i reconfigured the device manually and it boots correctly and syncs with the built-in firmware, but only with the 16/1 fallback mode of G.993.2 (VDSL2, Profile 17a) because the built-in firmware does not support vectoring.
Im on a Deutsche Telekom Line.
Like with older versions of OpenWRT i wanted to copy an alternative firmware, like dsl_vr9_firmware_xdsl-05.08.01.05.00.07_05.08.00.09.00.01.bin but then noticed that the device does not have enough free space.
Ok, so wanted to expand the overlay via extroot only to find that the device does not even have enough space for kmod-usb-storage and ext4 :(((
Any idea on getting vectoring running with the provided build or is this the time where a custom firmware is required (without e.g. luci and maybe the vectoring firmware built-in)?
@elder_tinkerer thanks for the suggestion, i saw that device quite a lot in the discussion. since im happy with everything else from the 9980 (line speed is lower than what it can handle) it would be a pity to not use it further.
@nicefile thank you for that thread, i did not find it but starting with this post, it is exactly my question (before that it was about extracting the firmware, which is also a science for itself it seems)
so i followed the quick way and used the firmware-selector and removed the non-vectoring firmware and added the extroot requirements, so my modified package list looks like this:
The resulting firmware flashes just fine on the device and has a bit over 1M of overlay space free (without extroot enabled), so copying the DSL firmware is no problem (im giving the 5.9.1.4.0.7 from your linked thread a try).
I tried my luck and opkg installed luci but it failed near the end due to no space left so ill stick with an SSH only firmware for now and keep the tweaking via a self-built firmware for later (also quite easy nowadays with the docker images).
Thanks a lot, lets see how stable that OS/driver/firmware combination is
I never tried this, but is it maybe possible to add the vectoring firmware to the image when using the firmware selector? So you don't need to copy it to RAM.
Yes, i know that it is not allowed to be redistributed.
I just thought, maybe it's possible to upload a package from the pc to the online firmware selector to be integrated in the build.
After another cup of tea it's quite obvious, that this isn't possible...
Just forget that idea...
So the only solution is of course to build the firmware on your own system.
@elder_tinkerer not with firmware-selector, but the image builder is supposed to add/remove files, see this post in the mentioned thread.
For me its enough though to remove the non-vectoring firmware so i have enough free space in the rw part of the overlay on the flash. Note, its not ram, it survives a powerdown of the system. Its the JFFS2 (or UBIFS) filesystem thats mapped via OverlayFS together with the readonly SquashFS part.
RAM filesystems are e.g. /tmp.
So i copy the dsl firmware once after flashing openwrt and its done. For just one router, thats very easy.
Going to my first 24h without disconnect. Of course, thats no timerange for judging, but its a start.
You're of course right.
I don't know how i've could written such a nonsense and even didn't recognized it as such. Must be the advanced age, or i was just too tired.
