Out of memory on TL-WR1043ND with 21.02

[bobafetthotmail]

@peshos

I was still expecting that a device, for which there is an official 21.02 build with LuCI and everything would be able to work at least as a dumb AP.

Devices are disabled from official builds due to low RAM only if people open bug reports or send patches to do so (and I mean patches to disable default build, not delete the source).

So just because you see a device in the release does not mean it actually works.

The only automated limit is for flash space, firmware images too big for the device are deleted automatically by the build system.

I've missed the information that 21.02 is recommended only for 8/64 devices.

For the record, it's in the release announcement OpenWrt 21.02.0 - First Stable Release

The strangest part is that most of the time the device does not show lack of memory, this is why I wondered what might trigger oom's:

Mem: 18540K used, 7504K free, 1076K shrd, 1800K buff, 3964K cached
CPU:   0% usr   1% sys   0% nic  95% idle   0% io   0% irq   2% sirq

If you disabled most services, only ram activity should come from Luci (that is activated only when you connect to the device and is otherwise mostly dormant) and wifi.

Also using opkg (installing packages) wastes a lot of RAM and that cache isn't cleared until reboot (or unless you do manual console commands to clear it). So if you installed packages in a low-RAM device, remember to reboot.