[HOWTO] Installing OpenWrt on Sophos RED 15w

there weren't many commands involved, I just used screen for the serial communication and cat /proc/cpuinfo on openwrt to view the frequency. Finally, for the network speed tests i used iperf3 -s and iperf3 -c [IP of Server] on ther Server and client respectively.

To perform the overclock, you have to solder the resistors on the right of the cpu socket (I can give you the numbers later) to the other position, left (closer to cpu) is 0, right (further from cpu) is 1, to get the OC you want, you can also find the values in the PDFs that I linked.

The steps from the first post are still valid, this is technically completely independent of OpenWrt (although I've only tested it with that)

The resistors are really small, so take your time and be careful when soldering. It may be enough to remove the resistors, but I don't know how stable that will run. They are also very easy to lose!
If you really don't want to break your RED15, I'd recommend not overcloking it, there's always some risk of breaking it.

For the procedure:

  1. Power off your RED15(w)
  2. Disassemble your RED15(w)
  3. move the resistors to the positions for the overclock that you want,
    for 800MHz:
    move the 3rd and 4th (from the bottom of the cluster in the picture, they should be on the left (0) position as in the picture) resistor to the right (1) positions.
  4. reassemble your RED15(w)
  5. boot device
  6. fun!

I do not take any responsibility for broken Devices.

Oh, so you have to remove the CPU?
In that case, I'm not going to do that.
For one thing, I don't have the right tools and for another, I don't want to break the device.

I had hoped there was a software-based way by now.

no, I just removed the CPU of one of the RED15s that I had to find the traces.
You only have to solder 2 Resistors to get 800MHz

specifically, this is what it looks like "stock" (apart from the desoldered CPU)
The Resistors marked in Red are on the left side for 533MHz, desolder them and resolder them to the right positions (as the one above them) for 800MHz.

Hi,

I am experiencing some issues with the install guide.
I have 6 RED 15w, of which I only tried 3 so far.

All of them end up boot looping on these errors:

[ 0.795623] /dev/root: Can't open blockdev
[ 0.799767] VF: Cannot open root device "(null)" or unknown-block(0,0): error c - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(01 Comm: swapper Not tainted 5.15.167 #0

Everything else in the guide worked fine, except i had to change the LAN subnet while live booted from TFTP, because I already use the 192.168.1.1 subnet as my main LAN. Otherwise I couldn't download the upgrade file.

Any ideas, what could be causing this?

A small update:
As pointed out by JonLit, the version 23.05.5 does not work (hopefully yet?).
It just ends up boot-looping with previously mentioned errors.

Versions 24.10.0-rc1 and rc7 also do not work (I only tested those two), both showing the following error, even when live booting via TFTP and when sysupgrading:

ERROR: new format image overwritten - must RESET the board to recover

Powercycling the board does not help.

To simplify:
23.05.2 - WORKS
23.05.2 -> 23.05.4 - WORKS
23.05.5 - boot looping
23.05.2 -> 23.05.5 - boot looping
23.05.2 -> 24.10.0-rc1 - image overwritten error
23.05.2 -> 24.10.0-rc7 - image overwritten error
24.10.0-rc7 tftp boot - image overwritten error

Also, as a small addition to the guide, it is also possible to sysupgrade either from GUI, or from a local file, uploaded via SCP for example.
This is useful, if you are connecting the WAN interface to a 192.168.1.0/24 LAN, since the internet connection will not work because of the overlapping subnets.

I encountered the same problem. 23 is normal, 24 can't start, so I can only roll back to the old version. Now I don't know what to do

okay so have you looked through the git commits for the hardware between 23.05.4 and 23.05.5?

It's probably worth moving this issue out into a different topic, have you got the bootlog from serial so we can see what happens at boot?

I'm having bootloop issues with the Aerohive BR200 which uses the same processor / openwrt target. I've opened a bug report over here:

https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues/17846