Tplink, netgear, 4MB, and they have web interface?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hi,

little question : why netgear or tplink manufacturers can hold LUCI or web interface on original firmware, even on device with 4MB storage?

thank you

2

Because their firmware has a smaller footprint.

3

aren't they based on owrt?

4

They're based on old vendor SDKs.

5

It’s not about “features vs size”, it’s about modularity vs tight integration. The more flexible the system (like OpenWrt), the more storage it needs.

For comparison, I was recently looking at MikroTik hEX which comes with 16 MB flash and 256 MB RAM, and still supports a surprising amount of routing features out of the box. It’s honestly mind boggling what they manage to fit into that little device.

6

Emphasis should be put on old. Some of the vendor firmware is based on kernel versions dating back many years.

One of the most significant driving forces in the growth of the firmware image size is the kernel itself. There is a great analysis by @slh found in the 4/32 warning wiki page (and a link from there, too). Although the table on that page covers 10.03 - 17.01, the trend obviously continues, driven most significantly by the kernel. It would be cool to see a more recent one that demonstrates the growth from 17.01 - 25.12 based on the kernel versions.

7

More or less the same trend, with one notable exception, roughly +800-900 KB for a tls provider (https and most importantly WPA3 support). apk (vs opkg) also weighs a bit (~150 KB) more.

8

Other posters already gave good answers. I would like to add a little story that I’ve seen on Reddit recently. It comes from an adjacent corner of the tech space, NAS devices. Long story short, a user is trying to figure out why their Synology NAS (sadly, they didn’t name the model, so we don’t know whether it’s an x64 or ARM device) works fine on the local network, but stutters when accessed remotely. Turns out, a TCP congestion control feature called BBR, which has been in mainline Linux since 2016, is not implemented in DSM, Synology’s specialist NAS OS. They probably omitted it (and who knows what else) to better fit the OS into the confines of a small boot drive…

9

I have been updating the sysupgrade image size table on the currently more relevant 8/64 warning page:
https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/864_warning

Wndr3700v1 has been supported the whole period:

25.12.0-rc1:   6912 kB
24.10.5:       6528 kB
23.05.6:       6016 kB
22.03.7:       6017 KB
21.02.7:       5313 KB
19.07.9:       4097 KB
18.06.8:       3712 KB
17.01.7:       3584 KB
15.05.1:       3584 KB
14.07:         3328 KB
12.09:         2816 KB
10

The main reason is likely just the age of the SDK used for that Nas series. The SDK is so old that it has no support for that "new" 2016 feature. Quote from reddit:

BBR, which has been in mainline Linux since 2016 and is specifically designed for lossy or latency-variable links, isn't available in the DSM kernel.

Based on the further discussion there, the sad part is that apparently their newer SDK versions are based on kernel 5.10, which LTS is also old (and has only 3 years lifetime)

got a response that they're evaluating BBR for a future release

If Synology do include BBR in a future DSM version it will only be for the models with Linux kernel 5.10 which currently limits it to:

DS1825+, DS1525+, DS925+, DS725+, DS425+, DS225+ and RS2825RP+. DS124, DS423, DS223j and DS223. SA6400.

That behaviour is pretty typical with router manufacturers: they have a trusted SDK and they stick to that, even if it gets old. That makes it easier to manage features/bugs for a whole family of devices.

Here on the forum are examples from Qualcomm QSDK bootlogs for ath11k with a rather old kernel. Funnily enough, even ath12k QSDK for the wifi7 / 802.11be / IPQ9574 chip seems to be based on kernel 5.4...
Spectrum SBE1V1K (IPQ9574) OpenWrt Support :

Description: ARM64 OpenWrt Linux-5.4.213

11

That module would add a few kbs to the kernel so it’s not about the space.. Synology doesn’t need a big boot drive. Just big enough to hold the kernel/initramfs. The OS itself is installed to the drives itself on a seperate partition.

Synology has never updated the kernel in any of their NAS boxes. They’re not going to start anytime soon. If that happens I’ll eat my hat​:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: