Hi,
I'm having an MR3420v3 which I would like to use for some simple wifi-bridging. I know it has only 4MB flash, which is bad. But some time ago somebody made a patch for LEDE 17.04 IIRC and later it got "officially" supported via the ath79 DTS target. But it only get's an initramfs and https://openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-mr3420 says v3 is unsupported. What's the use of the initramfs?
Initramfs is a non-persistent (ram based) installation which is useful for development work and/or initial installation on certain types of devices. It is not suitable for running a standard/working configuration.
Yup... 4/32 devices haven't been supported in many years. Running a very old version of OpenWrt will be a security liability and it is not recommended, nor is it supported in any way.
This may suggest that development on the v3 device was never completed and/or that it ran into insurmountable issues involving the chipset, storage space, or memory.
As a result, your device can be considered entirely unsupported by OpenWrt.
You could try this:
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if you are ready enough to resolder ram to 64MB an flash to 16MB, this device is still capable to run latest OpenWRT, at least my mr3220 v1 is.
i you are not -- don't waste your time.
As the initramfs images are not flashed, but only RAM booted, there are no size limits encoded into the image recipes - accordingly you may find them as build results even if all normal images are missing (because those exceed the specified maximum sizes). This does not all mean that the initramfs would be usable, they aren't suitable for flashing anyways (and will exceed your flash size), but they very likely won't boot up either, due to the way too small RAM (which gets even tighter with initramfs booting) of your device.
How was this even possible as my 21.02 buil without luci gets too big?
[mktplinkfw] *** error: images are too big by 463729 bytes
See what was removed from the linked image to fit the size requirements.