HI, i recently got this RE220v3 and a quick scearch leads me here on the OpenWRT wiki, thankfully i am not a first-timer, but to be sure, has anyone flash the RE220v3 with openwrt?, looking at the wiki pages for the RE220v2 and RE200v3 they seem both to have the same underlying hardware as the RE220v3 and it also seems that the only difference in the 2 firmwares
openwrt-23.05.5-ramips-mt76x8-tplink_re220-v2-squashfs-factory.bin
openwrt-24.10.5-ramips-mt76x8-tplink_re200-v3-squashfs-factory.bin
seems to just be the target device nut the architecture target and partition layout seem the same, at least from what i can tell, also the fact that the RE200 seems to actually be more update and maintained then the RE220v2.
Mainly i would like to know if anyone has ever tried to do this on this device, and witch firmware would give me the best shot, i am tending to the RE200v3
Also i have read that i may need to downgrade the firmware but the only one i cloud find that appears to be the very first one is RE220(US)_V3.8_1.0.11 Build 220805 from 2022, but i am not sure.
Thanks for your time!
edit: with RE220(US)_V3.8_1.0.11 Build 22080 it rejects both
same with RE220(EU)_V3_1.0.23 Build 230418, any idees ok perhaps how to bypass?
edit2: tried all of the following, all of the get rejected
openwrt-23.05.5-ramips-mt76x8-tplink_re220-v2-squashfs-factory.bin
openwrt-24.10.5-ramips-mt76x8-tplink_re200-v2-squashfs-factory.bin
openwrt-24.10.5-ramips-mt76x8-tplink_re200-v3-squashfs-factory.bin but this gest all the way to the end and then fails
openwrt-24.10.5-ramips-mt76x8-tplink_re200-v4-squashfs-factory.bin
NEVER flash a firmware that is not intended for your device. In the best case, some features don't work and in the worst case you get a permanent brick. You can try to boot an initramfs version over TFTP, that's relatively safe, but again: don't flash it!
Out of experience, TP-Link tends to change the partition layout between devices and even between different versions. There was e.g. a huge difference between RE200v1 and RE200v2. And sometimes they do this even between different regions (EU vs. US) as seen on the WPA8630.
That said: I had a look at the firmware upgrade file for the RE220v3. It is suspiciously small (2.6MiB) and binwalk detects a "TP-Link RTOS firmware", not a Linux kernel. So I suppose this device has just 4MiB flash, similar to the RE200v5 and is therefore unsupportable.
yes i noticed that too but it also seems that the re220 tplink original firmware update file does not include the boot partition as it says “noboot” even in the file name
It does not include the bootloader, that is common for firmware updates. The boot loader is, however, independent from the Linux kernel (i.e. the kernel is loaded by the boot loader). For a lot of current devices, U-Boot is used as boot loader (the RE200v1 firmware update contains the boot loader, something very uncommon and risky).
Can be redboot or whatever vxworks includes. IMG0 is "root partition" where from boot file needs be loaded, followed by DATA partition, either can be own format with or without wear levelling or fat16.
Dual boot vxworks from same manufacturer include elf headers and uboot.
