Lede tested on Linksys EA9500

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After spending a month with this router and was able to gather enough information from the Linksys Firmware log as well as discussions on openwrt to build Lede for this router.

Few key observations:

  1. It uses dual trx images for failsafe purpose
  2. Broadcom 4366c0 wireless chip is used and it's firmware is missing. Although it can be extracted from dhd.ko
  3. CPU port is 5 just like Netgear R8000. Which needs changes to b53_common.c and 02_Network

I've documented the investigation here: https://serialize.wordpress.com/

Any suggestions welcome.

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The problem is Linux kernel always assumes that first TRX is "firmware" and second TRX is "failsafe". It's true only in 50% of cases which means many people may end up with not-booting firmware.

Having support for marking one TRX as "failsafe" was the first step.

Currently I'm working on cleaner TRX support, I sent
[PATCH V2 1/2] mtd: add support for partition parsers
[PATCH V2 2/2] mtd: extract TRX parser out of bcm47xxpart into a separated module

I've some idea how to make TRX firmware vs. failsafe detection work. I'll work on this once getting TRX cleanup (above patches) accepted.

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Thanks rmilecki! Your work is commendable.

I noticed one other issue however. This router has 8 + 1 ports and possibly two switches. But it seems I can only configure one switch (switch0). So can't make use of the other four ports - let's say for separate vlan.

Also unless you've missed, the source for this router is now available:

http://downloads.linksys.com/downloads/gpl/EA9500_v1.1.7.177204.tar.gz

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If anyone is interested in testing out my builds feel free to download them from: