Newbie trying to find and apply sercomm partition parser patch for the r6700v2

Newbie here with newie question.

How do I find the latest Sercomm partition parser patch for the 6700v2 and apply it?

Needing an upgrade to my old router, I got the Netgear 6700v2 because it was based on the mediatek platform which seems to have strong support these days. My first 6700v2 had no bad blocks, but the second is of by 20000. I learned how to compile my own firmware, adjusted the partition map thanks to Borromini. This left me with having to compile once for the router with bad blocks, and either compile again (or download the snapshot from firmware-selector).

These devices are rather inexpensive so I took a gamble and tried to get another router but got another one with bad blocks!

The motivation to find that patch and learn how to apply it is much greater!

So currently, I can compile to 5.10 and have even tried the testing 5.15 kernel without problems (for my usage at least - basic routing with SQM, adblock, dawn, and a dumb AP).

I'm assuming there is some .patch file somewhere? Or do I just try to find one of those emails, copy/paste into a .patch, place the file into the /target/linux/ramips/patches-5.15/ directory? Theres some documentation about "quilt". How does it fit into the build process?

I know - very newbie questions. Sorry for the handholding. In doing this, I'm happy to try to make patch more official though it sounds like it might be in the works, just slowly.

I believe this is the full patch (which will make OpenWrt read out the bad block table). By appending raw/ to the URL you can download the patch.

@janh Can you confirm this is the most recent one? Since it's marked as superseded in Patchwork.

Here is a current patch to make use of the upstreamed parser that is now already in OpenWrt master: https://github.com/janh/openwrt/commit/ca32b461e8e33bf2e2e2abd7d361c00c010a653c (append ".patch" to the end to download in actual patch format).

1 Like

Thank you both for providing the .patch file. It worked!

Before you had showed me the patch, I had looked at the older codes from emails (early 2021) and noticed that the scpart.c has already been included in the 5.10/5.15 kernel, so I figured what is left to make it work was to modify the .dtsi file.

So I manually changed the files, added the bunch of reserved partitions, ML partitions and added the "scpart-id = <#>;" but on boot, dmesg showed that SCPART identified the SC PART MAP at 0x100000 but wasn't able to correctly parse it.

The difference seems to be that I needed to add sercomm to the "secromm,scpart-id = <#>". I definitely wouldn't have been able to figure that out on my own.

The new firmware is identifying the partitions and adjusting for the bad blocks as needed - tried the same firmware on both hardware with and without bad blocks.

Thanks again!

I think I see the patch finally merging into Master few days ago. Hurray! And thank again for all the work. I (and the countless others) do appreciate it!

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 10 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.