I would care that much about this. I know devices that have no rule at all. My guess is that no one has cared to set them. That simple 
Considering that it's very easy to set up, each user can customize.
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Edit: seems that Luci is being built in to the 23.05/snapshot images now, so don't worry about the below...
All the packages seem to be up for the 23.05 snapshot, but no Luci installed, so you will have to SSH in and do;
opkg update && opkg install luci
You will then have a GUI.
I then checked the build number and was of last night it seemed to be identical to the master snapshot on the firmware selector page. I expect master snapshot numbers will diverge from 23.05 snapshot over time.
what's the total disk space available for openwrt softwares? thank you
I don't know all the technicalities but I believe there's a reasonable amount of space if you build packages into the image. If you follow my instructions on this thread regarding the image builder you should be able to manage it.
could you please check your luci--system--software page, what's your free space% and size?
Here are the system overview and the software pages. But I think if you build packages in to the image it may not affect the space free like you think. I don't think the space free reflects the full space free of the router, but part of the actual space partitioned/reserved as "free space".
Edit:
The TOH page states that this device has 256MiB of flash storage and 512MiB of ram. I think that installing packages in the firmware image puts them in the read only firmware partition, leaving the ram read/write overlay partition untouched, but installing packages afterwards installs them in a ram based read/write overlay partition that is superimposed over the top of the read only firmware partition.
Clearly the amounts shown in the screen shots don't add up or correspond 100% to the flash and ram overlay partition in the hardware, backing my thinking, but I've read various things elsewhere that support my thinking, though I believe there is also a limit to how much you can put in a firmware image and that is where things get hazy for me as I am not sure what that limit is or why. I haven't done the digging to understand this fully.
Even stating that packages are installed in ram doesn't fully make sense to me, so I am likely to be completely wrong about those details, as otherwise house does a package survive a reboot? The overlay must be in the flash storage somewhere... See corrections above with thanks to @frollic.
Anyone care to provide more correct information?
Edit 2:
Here are the same screenshots after I went from a very recent master/SNAPSHOT build with Luci, Luci-app-attendedsysupgrade and luci-mod-dashboard built in to the firmware image using the firmware builder page (or perhaps it was an attended sysupgrade, but both use the same back end and both use the master/snapshot source rather than the 23.05/snapshot branch source, not that there's much difference at present) to the latest 23.05/SNAPSHOT image that has luci pre-installed, but where I had to manually install the other two packages after the fact from the software page. Manually installing the packages seems to use up more of the free space than building them in to the firmware image. (See links below, may be because the overlay file system uses JFFS which is less efficient than the squasfs that is used in the firmware image itself)
Edit 3:
If you need more space for packages or other software, you can add a USB device on some routers, but obviously the Wax206 doesn't have a USB port. You can also do extroot but might face the same limitation (though see below about using extroot from a network share), but the extroot page below still has some interesting information on how the file system works...
Here are some helpful pages;
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correct, it reflects the full space available to openwrt.
nothing gets installed in RAM, RAM content doesn't survive a reboot.
it's a dual fw device, to start with, you'll never get 256MB free flash space.
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Yeah, thanks, I realised about the volatile ram thing after I wrote that and mentioned it later in my post, but appreciate the clarification. Edit: made some corrections in my previous post to reflect this...
I understood that some devices give half the storage to an "A" partition/version of the firmware and half to a "B" partition/version to facilitate rescue if one firmware setup gets corrupted, and I've seen the Luci package to force booting from a particular partition. I think a lot of of PC bioses and even many Android phones do the same now for rescue and to update B while running from A then switch only when the alternate is successfully updated.
I still don't understand why "disk space" is allocated so little space and "temp space" is allocated so much, maybe because routers used to have so little storage? Presumably "disk space" in the system overview is where packages get installed as it seems to correspond in size and usage with the "free space" in the software section in both my sets of screenshots.)
temp space is up to 50% of the RAM, it's not related to the routers actual storage, in any way.
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| mtd5: | 02600000 | 00020000 | “ImageA” |
|---|---|---|---|
| mtd6: | 025e0000 | 00020000 | “Kernel” |
| mtd7: | 002a0000 | 00020000 | “kernel” |
| mtd8: | 02340000 | 00020000 | “rootfs” |
| mtd9: | 00c60000 | 00020000 | “rootfs_var” |
| mtd10: | 02600000 | 00020000 | “Kernel_backup” |
Partition layout is unclear (two "kernel"). Based on similar size, I assume that mtd5 is the default partition, and mtd10 the "other" partition ?
Interesting. Does Netgear provide dual fw on its router now (just as Linksys) ? I haven't bought a Netgear for a while.
They do, if you reset the device, it'll roll back to the backup fw.
This is what my device looked like OpenWrt support for WAX206 - #32 by frollic
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Interesting thank you. The WAX206 seems an valuable device I'm considering for future buy.
i think disk space is decided by vendor for what is appropriate for the stock firmware. openwrt usually leave it unchanged unless there's a problem, like e8450. (or i could be totally wrong)
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Is that so that stock firmware can easily be restored? Or in the case of dual firmware so if the OpenWRT firmware becomes corrupted it will still revert to stock and not throw errors caused by changed partitions?
Would it be hard to enlarge the overlay partition, or to overlay another secondary overlay partition (additional, created from free unpartitioned space) on top of the first overlay? Or to use a symlink to allow packages or extra data (say, a web root or a media server with large space requirements) to be installed?
Edit:
Found this really interesting post from hynman. He suggests that /tmp/syscfg is not volatile and can be used for data storage, but it's still limited -the device he's talking about has 28Mb, so not much for a serious web root or nextcloud or even email server etc, don't know if others differ.
Also interesting commands - df, dmesg, cat /proc/mtd
Yes.
Maybe.
There is no generic answer to this, it really depends on each individual device. Unless unavoidable, the OEM partitioning is treated as sacred, because repartitioning is always dangerous - the onus of proving that it's safe in this case would be on you. Keep in mind that with a/b dual-firmware setups, the OEM bootloader knows about the dual-firmware and may act really badly if you clobber the second partition, so it's not 'just' about the easy cases of normal operations, but also about the uncommon cases of recovery/ reset and reinstalling the OEM firmware.
rygle if you go to the mount point screen or just check mounts in the shell I think it explains your observation, bear in mind all my openwrt installs only have 19.x so I dont have the latest stuff yet.
As an example on my plusnet one hub (rebadged home hub 5).
I see 3.75MB for /rom which is 100% utilised, I assume this is read only, and would grow if you integrate packages into the firmware as you described.
The overlay has a whopping 106.93MB with most of it as free space.
I would hope the WAX206 has 128MB in total for OpenWRT, but of course some of it lost to the /rom and any other overheads. Your reported space seems really low for what would expect, so I am very curious of the mount points output if you are able to check. 
I recall frollic explaining this to me a short time ago but forgot what was said now, so would need to search for his post.
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_______ ________ __
| |.-----.-----.-----.| | | |.----.| |_
| - || _ | -__| || | | || _|| _|
|_______|| __|_____|__|__||________||__| |____|
|__| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M
-----------------------------------------------------
OpenWrt 23.05-SNAPSHOT, r23042-3a1cb63336
-----------------------------------------------------
root@OpenWrt:~# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 4352 4352 0 100% /rom
tmpfs 251248 1124 250124 0% /tmp
/dev/ubi0_1 18232 344 16920 2% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay 18232 344 16920 2% /
tmpfs 512 0 512 0% /dev
root@OpenWrt:~# cat /proc/mtd
dev: size erasesize name
mtd0: 00080000 00020000 "Preloader"
mtd1: 00040000 00020000 "ATF"
mtd2: 00080000 00020000 "Bootloader"
mtd3: 00080000 00020000 "Config"
mtd4: 00100000 00020000 "Factory"
mtd5: 02600000 00020000 "firmware"
mtd6: 00600000 00020000 "kernel"
mtd7: 02000000 00020000 "ubi"
mtd8: 02600000 00020000 "firmware_backup"
mtd9: 00800000 00020000 "CFG"
mtd10: 00400000 00020000 "RAE"
mtd11: 00100000 00020000 "POT"
mtd12: 00400000 00020000 "Language"
mtd13: 00200000 00020000 "Traffic"
mtd14: 00100000 00020000 "Cert"
mtd15: 00100000 00020000 "NTGRcryptK"
mtd16: 00500000 00020000 "NTGRcryptD"
mtd17: 00100000 00020000 "LOG"
mtd18: 00640000 00020000 "User_data"
Edit:
When I installed block-mount I got the extra mount points menu item in the Luci system menu and it confirms what is there in the results of the df command posted earlier. The WAX206 seems to have a massive amount of space in the /tmp directory, 251248 KB, or about 245MiB if I divide by 1024. It seems like it's not volatile, but I'm not sure. I wonder if this could be used to allow further storage such as @eckndu was asking about? Perhaps it could be symlinked in to the overlay to allow more packages? Or for something like a mail/http/nextcloud server etc? Admittedly you wouldn't want stuff that's written and wiped at a high rate due to the nature of this flash memory, but could be useful for something mainly read only.
Edit 2:
According to the wiki, /tmp or tmpfs is volatile.
Im getting an error with both yesterday and today's snapshot custom build from firmware-selector. I only added luci, and I get Error: Impossible package selection
Collected errors:
- pkg_hash_check_unresolved: cannot find dependency libubox20230523 for mtd
- pkg_hash_fetch_best_installation_candidate: Packages for mtd found, but incompatible with the architectures configured
- opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package mtd.
- satisfy_dependencies_for: Cannot satisfy the following dependencies for mtd:
- libubox20230523
- opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package mtd.
make[2]: *** [Makefile:187: package_install] Error 255
make[1]: *** [Makefile:152: _call_manifest] Error 2
make: *** [Makefile:272: manifest] Error 2
Try 23.05-snapshot, Luci is included by default since it’s a release branch.
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This is just a librairy package update. It has been fixed for most of targets. Just try again, it will be fixed soon. I have been able to build for several targets today.
EDIT
https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/packages/aarch64_cortex-a53/base/
search "libu"
It's not yet available. But the timestamp is old, that means it should be updated soon.
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