Hi guys , first post here , I was testing tonight and today with the W8960N v5.1 , after some difficultys I get it working reasonabily.
What I does :
First flash with this image from CFE web (http) server . The CFE web server gonna be lost since this point, probably need to re-solder the button to other place in the board.
In this point you have working LuCI and dropbear , and system force you to put an admin password when go by web. Extra : don't be excited , is bad flashed , only a few Kbs of overlay are showed, don't configure things and anything else than the admin password, in this point only half way , specially don't touch the SWITCH if you go to failsafe mode here you are in bad problems READ the appendix.
-----------( This is the way my lack of knowledge forces me to bypass the TP Link bootloader header and footer )-------------------------------------------
Go to system -> Backup / Flash Firmware , and from this menu flash sysupgrade with this image , gonna ask confirmation , say ok , and wait until the full flash
when reboot go to 192.168.1.1 (remember , you don't changed things true ?) use your password , and voilà you have the TP Link TD W8960N v 5.1 with 18.06.4 and 4 mb of flash free for your experiments and deploying.
The Overlay is 8 MB
Some extra bad news APPENDIX :
Never touch the switch page from LuCI , especially until you got the last image flashed , in the intermediate point if you go out of switch link with the cpu and need to go to failsafe yo return with no LuCI , no dhcp , no dropbear and forced to telnet , passwd root , ifconfig & route & /etc/resolv manually to install LuCI via opkg and can flash the second image at the end.
The problems declared are the ADSL (this is well know with Broadcom) and the switch , I think can be a bad GPIO derived to use other model firmware , but I'm lack of knowledge to say what happens in the switch.
Think reasonably well flashed for my purposes , but some ideas about the switch ?
Best regards.