Hello,
This device seems to be a 4MB RAM/32 MB disk space device.
Does anyone have any information as to which hardware it is equivalent to so that a basic Openwrt can be loaded on it?
Please refrain from stating that these are EOL devices, as a number of such ROMs exist, just need hardware details.
TIA.
It's not clear to me exactly what you're asking...
If this is the case, you probably already know that OpenWrt cannot run on 4/32 devices (you'd need to go back to ~18.06 make an image that could fit, and that's assuming that all of the other chipset/driver support would be available in that old version; obviously running really old versions of OpenWrt is bad from a security perspective)
Is the goal here to find something that is "similar enough" such that you could load the image for that device onto your C20?
As a general rule, this is not possible without potentially bricking the device. Every device uses bespoke images that account for the hardware design (as in literally the specifics for the ram and flash chips, the ethernet and radio chipsets, and down to the pinout level for which pins are used for each I/O to connect to the other system components).
If one is identified, you could theoretically take a similar device and then modify the DTS file, compile and build the image yourself, and then try installing it... but to do so requires a reasonable amount of time effort -- far more than just buying a new router.
I know you don't want to hear that this device is beyond any reasonable support, but keep in mind that you'd be sinking a lot of effort into an ancient version of OpenWrt that has many known and actively exploited security vulnerabilities (that will never be fixed in the old versions). That's on top of the fact that you'd be completely on your own in terms of modifying the DTS file, building your image, and even just configuring and using it those versions are very old and clearly unsupported.
If you have binwalk just list firmware bin - most likely 4MB firmware is vxworks, not linux.
Loaded on the equivalent device, or loaded on the Archer that you already stated has too small flash space?
Here is the binwalk for the ROM file:
$ binwalk Archer-C20-6.28-TPOS-up-noboot-128B_2025-07-31_16.29.52.bin
148 0x94 LZMA compressed data, properties: 0x6E, dictionary size: 8388608 bytes, uncompressed size: 5727424 bytes
1724492 0x1A504C LZMA compressed data, properties: 0x5D, dictionary size: 8388608 bytes, uncompressed size: -1 bytes
1776766 0x1B1C7E LZMA compressed data, properties: 0x5D, dictionary size: 8388608 bytes, uncompressed size: -1 bytes
1795862 0x1B6716 LZMA compressed data, properties: 0x5D, dictionary size: 8388608 bytes, uncompressed size: -1 bytes
1978118 0x1E2F06 LZMA compressed data, properties: 0x5D, dictionary size: 8388608 bytes, uncompressed size: -1 bytes
2001843 0x1E8BB3 LZMA compressed data, properties: 0x5D, dictionary size: 8388608 bytes, uncompressed size: -1 bytes
2038328 0x1F1A38 LZMA compressed data, properties: 0x5D, dictionary size: 8388608 bytes, uncompressed size: -1 bytes
ā¦.
Looks like it is vxworks?
Sir,
4 MB RAM / 32 MB disk space is not restricted to Openwrt 18. Here is a detailed method to get Openwrt 19 running on 4 MB RAM / 32 MB disk space devices:
I implore the Openwrt community not to heed to the Linux bloat demands and perhaps even float a mini version.
It took 10 years for Openwrt to hit the 4 MB / 32 MB disk space requirement and just 1 year for the 8 MB / 64 MB disk space warnings to appear.
That means that corporate bloat is not just a good to have but a concerted attack on Openwrt and Linux.
You just have to install any software today to see that they are intentionally exploiting the ādependency bloatā requirement of Openwrt. eg one can see:
where a single line stating that curl and wget is required and it is including the entire statically compiled version of these tools increasing bloat by 1MB with such unnecessary dependencies.
Same with wireguard and a lot of tools till the result is that Openwrt has simply given up now on 8 MB RAM and 64 MB disk space devices which is very unfortunate as PC like bloat has come in.
Moreover do check out zram that compresses RAM swap so you should get around 25-50% more RAM.
Thank you for your support. Do help keep Openwrt from corporatised bloat.
Yes, Iām trying to see if there is any other model with the similar hardware whose firmware can load on this device.
Then that build can be modified to use different wireless drivers if necessary to get it fully functional.
Just an example, if the other firmware loads, then it is a matter of changing the DEVICE_PACKAGES entries:
For reference only:
define Device/tplink_tl-wr902ac-v3
$(Device/tplink-v2)
IMAGE_SIZE := 7808k
DEVICE_MODEL := TL-WR902AC
DEVICE_VARIANT := v3
TPLINK_FLASHLAYOUT := 8Mmtk
TPLINK_HWID := 0x000dc88f
TPLINK_HWREV := 0x89
TPLINK_HWREVADD := 0x1
DEVICE_PACKAGES := kmod-mt76x0e kmod-usb2 kmod-usb-ohci \
kmod-usb-ledtrig-usbport
IMAGES := sysupgrade.bin tftp-recovery.bin
IMAGE/tftp-recovery.bin := pad-extra 128k | $$(IMAGE/factory.bin)
endef
TARGET_DEVICES += tplink_tl-wr902ac-v3
Thank you for your support. Do let me know if there is any update at all about this device that comes up in the community.
If the hardware is opened up by someone and connected using a serial port and the hardware device IDs obtained, that would be best. Do let us know.
That ship has sailed almost 7 years ago. The fork in question hasn't been touched in 4 years, while there have been plenty security issues over the last 7 years, and was archived by its owner a year ago. I think it's safe to say that it's dead, Jim.
The world is turning, security issues come up, new requirements are expected (e.g. WPA3, which requires a TLS provider, which weighs 0.7-1.0 MB on its own, etc. pp.). It's safe to assume that OpenWrt will not consider 4/32 devices anymore - and we know that 8/64 is on the brink as well, pleas will not change those facts. Buying a 4/32 device was a bad idea 15 years ago already and strongly recommended against by 2016/ 2017 at the latest. Even the projects that were running large fleets of these (e.g. freifunk) had to realize that they are a dead end. At the same time users expect decent wifi6/ wifi6e support (for which WPA3 is mandatory and not optional) and are dragging their feet about wifi7, these things are getting attention.
I'm not sure how that magically resolves that you're using a 4/32 device. Perhaps I'm missing an important detail.
Not sure why anyone in the community would be doing this to a known unsupported device, but OK. Also, not sure why you expect someone else to open a device when you own one yourself.
Lasty, if you're not willing to open your hardware, how would we know if there's a similar model? 
I think it's rather odd to expect support for such an old device.
The "similar" device is 2x bigger. Came running linux originally, even with some OEM source code provided allowing to select correct hardware for OpenWrt. Can easily happen that either 8MB flash or 64MB RAM will not fit default packages (common wan support+wifi+web admin) and gets thrown away for next release after 25.12.
If you buy:
Here https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi cudy XX3000X is ~50 bucks with 50x faster CPU and 10x ram/flash
If you want to cut corners and can accomodate wifi5 https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128 - some are 20 bucks, you can try finding second hand devices even cheaper.
I would not put high hopes but likely 16/64 devices get more chance to survive to next release and ar maybe 1 bucks worth (ie if you get them for free you can still enjoy their last years)
If you install a package from the repo, yes curl is required, because there was no way around it with opkg. If you just create an init script on your router, copying it from the source repo, you can get by without the curl. So no, it is not āincluding statically compiled version of these toolsā.
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