Hello everyone,
I’ve seen over the years how the community has been pushing to make the TP-Link RE355 v1 and RE450 v1/v2 work with their limited partitioning scheme. Those devices can allocate only 5.7 MB of firmware size.
Multiple challenges have affected the firmware size, but two of them are key:
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Migration from ar71xx to ath79: Older drivers with many workarounds had excellent performance but were hard to maintain.
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The need for WPA3 with strong encryption: This makes it necessary to use an encryption backend like OpenSSL or WolfSSL. Recently, it has become impossible to fit everything into such minimal sizes, so the firmware builder stopped generating new releases until the v23 release candidates.
That is going to change — partially.
I made a minimal PR months ago trying to move to the OpenWrt tiny variant. This variant doesn’t have LuCI but can be perfectly used with UCI and SSH command line. Everything was fine until the maintainers told me that my builds would be considerably smaller than the official ones. This is because the firmware builder creates the Linux kernel with all the standard modules. As a result, the firmware will not return to the Firmware Selector but instead can be built from source code to generate a SNAPSHOT release or any recent one like the 24.xx variants.
Why this is important?
In the forums, there are contributors who in good faith have made their own builds and shared binaries. Although we can assume people don’t intend to harm or get harmed, supply chain attacks are becoming more common, and there will always be malicious actors trying to make your device part of a botnet.
Getting an official way to build a variant guarantees trust and lets you safely build the firmware yourself.
Status:
As of Oct ’25, you may need to Git cherry-pick the PR commit in order to build OpenWrt with the latest stable release (24.xx). My expectation is that it will be promoted into the next stable release, as the code has already been merged.
Known Issues:
People moving from 19.x releases (ar71xx) to 20.x and newer have noticed a performance regression. A device capable of providing 600 Mbps up/down can now provide only 200/400 Mbps up/down. It’s known that this is part of the migration to ath79, and no tested workaround has solved it.
TODO:
In the PR, several contributors have asked about the possibility of gaining more space without bricking any device. People are welcome to suggest and test, but I only own a single RE450 v2 and can’t risk bricking it after others have also failed.
Thanks
I want to give special thanks to everyone who helped me to promote this code and to all the contributors who are still trying to keep these devices alive.
Your time, feedback, and testing have made a real difference for the community. Even with limited hardware, your effort proves that collaboration and persistence can keep these projects moving forward.
