Exploring Actiontec MI424WR Rev. I

For Developers
3

  1. I got Actiontec's GPL versions of OpenRG below version 50 working. The solution boiled down to "never use the -j options with make." 50.0.16.6.2 and 52.0.7 both won't boot, and I don't know why. They compile fine, but the router gets stuck at "booting the kernel" and every LED turns on, like I said earlier.

  2. I'm still not sure about backing up the original firmware, but I found an update link that gives me some kind of firmware update called MI424WR-GEN3I.rmt. It has a uImage header but won't boot through U-Boot. I backed up the 7 files in /mnt/jffs2 and I'm hoping that's enough to restore to stock. I still have no idea why there are two openrg images included with the stok installation. Does anybody know anything about that?

  3. PandoraBox works, I just needed to run these commands from U-Boot:

tftpboot PandoraBox-avanta-mi424-wr-2018-12-31-git-4b6a3d5ca-squashfs-factory.bin
nand erase 0x000003000000
nand write 0x2000000 0x000003000000 0x1000000
bootm

The default root password was admin.
Although this does involve writing to NAND, the router still boots to the stock firmware by default. Subsequent boots to PandoraBox can be done like this:

tftpboot PandoraBox-avanta-mi424-wr-2018-12-31-git-4b6a3d5ca-squashfs-factory.bin
bootm

I'm not really sure what's going on here. It seems like tftpboot sticks the pandorabox image at 0x2000000 in memory, then we erase 0x5000000 bytes on the NAND starting from 0x3000000, and then we write 0x1000000 bytes (all, since the image is 13MB) of the pandorabox image to address 0x3000000 on the NAND.

My next goal is to get PandoraBox building. The PandoraBox imagebuilder is posted with the images I linked up above, so that's what I'll try first. I also found this github repository and this github repository. (EDIT: These won't be useful, since both of these repositories are from before avanta was added as a target for pandorabox, which I think was in version 18.09) If I can get PandoraBox to build, then maybe porting their patches over to OpenWrt is within reach.

Useful resources (Google Translate does a good job with these):