I've been running RE450v1 & v3 for several years and decided to upgrade both of them last week to the latest release, but failed with v1, while v3 went just fine.
I use wifi roaming between them and therefore deploy full WPAD instead of the default one.
it turned our that after the upgrate v1 doesn't have enough space in the overlay partition, while v3 has plenty. They both have 8MB on board and I can't figure out what is wrong and how to fix that:
root@OpenWrt:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 3.5M 3.5M 0 100% /rom
tmpfs 60.3M 64.0K 60.2M 0% /tmp
tmpfs 60.3M 68.0K 60.2M 0% /tmp/root
tmpfs 512.0K 0 512.0K 0% /dev
/dev/mtdblock4 512.0K 236.0K 276.0K 46% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay 512.0K 236.0K 276.0K 46% /
root@OpenWrt:~# cat /tmp/sysinfo/model
TP-Link RE450 v1
cat /tmp/sysinfo/board_name
tplink,re450-v1
cat /etc/banner
_______ ________ __
| |.-----.-----.-----.| | | |.----.| |_
| - || _ | -__| || | | || _|| _|
|_______|| __|_____|__|__||________||__| |____|
|__| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M
-----------------------------------------------------
OpenWrt 21.02.2, r16495-bf0c965af0
-----------------------------------------------------
grep squash /proc/mounts
/dev/root /rom squashfs ro,relatime 0 0
are you saying that solution would be to build an image myself excluding ppp packages?
i wonder if somehow the partition was flashed in a wrong place/address and hence there is practically no space left just because it is occupied by the firmware piece?
I mean the f/w is 4-5 MB in size, but total flash is 8 MB and therefore I should have +/- the same amount of space just like on another h/w v3. Do I miss the point?
PPP and what it pulls in take quite some space (although it would not surprise me if your device already doesn't have it, since it's not a router but a repeater/AP).
If the flash partitioning is all over the place then it might very well be that the actual space available to OpenWrt, while keeping compatibility with TP-Link firmware, is very limited. Hence my recommendation to compare DTSes for the partition layout between v1 and v3.
I'm not sure I'm following you with DTS comparison
Do I get you right that it should be a predefined configuration file which Iwould later be used by image builder?
I did that 5-7 years ago last time when all devices were of 4 MB ROM so need to recap.
Your firmware partition is 005e0000 which is hex for 6160384 bytes (< 5.9 MiB). That's the space used for all three partitions you see listed underneath - kernel/rootfs/rootfs_data. In the DTS, you can see the partitions labeled, along with their sizes. Compare that with 7a0000 for your v3 ( > 7.6 MiB) and you can see the size difference (and the probable issue).
Keep in mind the kernel partition is not mounted and won't show up in df.
Thanks for looking into this, if I got the point the DTS files for the boards are indeed different and v1 seems to lack the details, while v3 is full of stuff:
I merely pointed to the DTS so you could get an idea of the complete layout.
The only thing you can do is making sure your image fits. I pointed out how much flash OpenWrt can use on each model. That's the constraints you're operating within.
aha, okay, so practically speaking that's behavior by design due to platform difference.
if I remember well the daily snapshot doesn't have luci so perhaps that would be easiest solution to move ahead, as i don't really use it on a dump AP.
Snapshot will have an even bigger kernel than 21.02. I'd recommend you build a 21.02 image without LuCI, but yeah you can use snapshot as well if you'd like.
You could explore the possibility of absorbing partition-table, info and config into the firmware, i.e. letting OpenWrt use them for jffs2 storage, clobbering any data that might be used by stock firmware. There is about 2 MB set aside there. But it is possible that something important like the sticker MAC address is in info, or it may not boot properly without partition-table. So make backups of all of them and have a way to restore if it doesn't work.
This sort of change usually isn't approved into the project since being able to somewhat easily return to stock firmware is considered important.
Nope. Exact same layout, otherwise sysupgrade would have broken your device. Did you notice you have no /overlay? So no writable file system? Like I said: bigger kernel, less space left.
ouch, something is really strange over here, 4 years old build cant fit as well:
root@OpenWrt:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 3.5M 3.5M 0 100% /rom
tmpfs 59.5M 76.0K 59.4M 0% /tmp
tmpfs 59.5M 48.0K 59.4M 0% /tmp/root
overlayfs:/tmp/root 59.5M 48.0K 59.4M 0% /
tmpfs 512.0K 0 512.0K 0% /dev
root@OpenWrt:~# cat /etc/banner
_______ ________ __
| |.-----.-----.-----.| | | |.----.| |_
| - || _ | -__| || | | || _|| _|
|_______|| __|_____|__|__||________||__| |____|
|__| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M
-----------------------------------------------------
OpenWrt SNAPSHOT, r19069-98113220fa
-----------------------------------------------------
I wish I recall the version I was running before the upgrade, it was definitely not THAT old
root@OpenWrt:~# sysupgrade -n openwrt-18.06.0-ar71xx-generic-re450-v1-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin -F
Mon Mar 7 21:28:50 UTC 2022 upgrade: Image not in /tmp, copying...
Mon Mar 7 21:28:50 UTC 2022 upgrade: Image metadata not present
Mon Mar 7 21:28:50 UTC 2022 upgrade: Use sysupgrade -F to override this check when downgrading or flashing to vendor firmware
Image check failed.
BusyBox v1.28.3 () built-in shell (ash)
_______ ________ __
| |.-----.-----.-----.| | | |.----.| |_
| - || _ | -__| || | | || _|| _|
|_______|| __|_____|__|__||________||__| |____|
|__| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M
-----------------------------------------------------
OpenWrt 18.06.0, r7188-b0b5c64c22
-----------------------------------------------------
=== WARNING! =====================================
There is no root password defined on this device!
Use the "passwd" command to set up a new password
in order to prevent unauthorized SSH logins.
--------------------------------------------------
root@OpenWrt:~# fd -h
-ash: fd: not found
root@OpenWrt:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 2.5M 2.5M 0 100% /rom
tmpfs 61.2M 68.0K 61.1M 0% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock4 1.9M 300.0K 1.6M 16% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay 1.9M 300.0K 1.6M 16% /
tmpfs 512.0K 0 512.0K 0% /dev
apparently it was possible to deploy something large enough with old releases... I can't belive I was running SUCH old one