TP-Link Archer C7 v2/v5 firmware size

For Developers
1

Why the size of the firmware so different in size?
Having two routers, both TP-Link Archer C7. The first one is v2, the second is v5.
The firmware for v2 is 16MB, while for v5 is only 6MB.
From what I see:

  • package set is the same;
  • hardware almost the same (CPU frequency higher for newer model);

What am I missing?

2

Share a link to the images you are looking at? Hard to say now if you're comparing apples and oranges.

3

1 - https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/22.03.0/targets/ath79/generic/openwrt-22.03.0-ath79-generic-tplink_archer-c7-v2-squashfs-factory.bin
2 - https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/22.03.0/targets/ath79/generic/openwrt-22.03.0-ath79-generic-tplink_archer-c7-v5-squashfs-factory.bin

The first one (v2) is 16MB, the second one (v5) is 6.2MB.

4

That's just the factory images - the sysupgrade images a very similar in size. The reason is the different image formats used by TP-Link: The v2 uses the tplink-v1-image whereas the v5 uses tplink-safeloader.

2 Likes
5

Thank you andyboeh.
So the amount of memory available for packages is the same for both models?

6

Roughly. The flash chip size is the same, but the Wiki page [1] suggests that the partition layout is different, leading to about 800k less space on the v5 (!).

[1] https://openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/archer_c7#flash_layout

1 Like