TL-WDR4300 is only using/showing 4MB of its 8MB Flash?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hello community.

I'm using a TP-Link TL-WDR4300 and installed LEDE 17.01.2 on it a few weeks ago.
Today I tried to install the OpenVPN package and got the message that there isn't enough space left on it.
So I searched a little bit about it and checked over PuTTY:

root@TL-WDR4300:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                 2.3M      2.3M         0 100% /rom
tmpfs                    61.3M      1.1M     60.2M   2% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock3            4.4M      4.3M    100.0K  98% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay        4.4M      4.3M    100.0K  98% /
tmpfs                   512.0K         0    512.0K   0% /dev

Clearly there isn't enough space left. I thought I have an 8MB Flash / 128MB RAM router here?!
At the same time I saw the new FW 17.01.4. So I installed the upgrade file and connected over PuTTY again:

root@TL-WDR4300:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                 2.3M      2.3M         0 100% /rom
tmpfs                    61.3M    556.0K     60.8M   1% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock3            4.4M    304.0K      4.1M   7% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay        4.4M    304.0K      4.1M   7% /
tmpfs                   512.0K         0    512.0K   0% /dev

Yeah, I thought! You can see the difference at Available in the line overlayfs:/overlay. There are 4.1M free like it should.
Until later I didn't realize at this time that the size didn't change to 8MB! It's still 4.4M. :man_facepalming:
So I tried to install OpenVPN again (over luci) but the site doesn't update.
I checked df -h again and was really surprised because my 4.1M free flash were suddenly gone.
Another boot, another PuTTY login but still

/dev/mtdblock3            4.4M      4.3M     56.0K  99% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay        4.4M      4.3M     56.0K  99% /

Then I also checked dmesg for the full 8MB of flash memory. And it's there.

root@TL-WDR4300:~# dmesg | grep m25p80
[    0.608620] m25p80 spi0.0: s25fl064k (8192 Kbytes)

So I like you to give me a hint or push me in the right direction how to get LEDE to use all of the 8MB and not just 4MB.
Would be nice, thanks in advance.

2

This is correct, it is using all 8MB of the chip now.

The following are all stored in the flash chip.
Bootloader + ART: 192k
Compressed Kernel image : approx 1M (it is not in a file system)
root squashfs (/rom) : 2.3M
JFFS (/overlay) : 4.4M

Routers with only a 4 MB chip end up with only about 300k for the jffs.

3

Hello mk24.
Thanks for clearing that up! :+1: Good to know.
So I have to use the extroot config for the possibility to install some packages.
...or find some installed packages that I don't need (if there are any). :thinking: