The explanation for why is here, (background). (This needs to be rewritten as its too complicated to follow).
Basically the US v2 device has different flash partition layouts depending on which version of the stock firmware is loaded. If the US device was officially supported in OpenWRT, you would need to carefully pick the right firmware or else you will accidentally brick your device. This was deemed too risky by the OpenWRT devs to be included in the official firmware, so for the time being I just put builds of the US firmware in that separate github repo with instructions detailing the risks. Its not ideal, but there is no safe way of supporting the US device, which is a pity.
The other problem with the US model is Firmware version 2.0.2 is completely unsupported due to its complicated partition scheme. We still have to come up with a workaround for it (i.e. handcrafted downgrade firmware).
For the WPA8630 v2, you don't have to worry about the PLC firmware, unless you want to upgrade it (which can be done with open-plc-utils
).
These OpenWRT images do not include any PLC firmware, it only overwrites the kernel and root-fs partitions, and leaves the existing partitions intact.
On the WPA8630P v2, there are 2 flash chips: the 8Mb router flash and the 1Mb dedicated PLC flash. When the PLC starts, it reads the firmware from its dedicated flash, and runs independently of the router.
The 8Mb router flash also contains a copy of the PLC firmware that comes with the stock firmware upgrade files. During an upgrade, this is "uploaded" by the stock firmware code from the router flash over the internal network to the PLC, which stores it in its own flash. After that point, the PLC is running independently.
AFAIK the COVR-P2500 AFAIK doesn't contain dedicated flash for the PLC, and instead loads it remotely over Ethernet every boot from the plchost
daemon running on the router.
Edit: Updated/simplified the wiki with the above information
Edit: The answer for Wifi is the same: Yes, the OpenWRT regional images do not include any region specific WiFi or PLC details link.
Only the partition table addresses are region specific, otherwise the images are the same. So you can use any image that has the same partition layout. For US FW Ver 2.0.1, it has the same layout as the AU, DE, CA models (tplink_tl-wpa8630p-v2-int
image). For US FW Ver 2.0.2, it has the different unsupported layout.