I got ZTE ZXHN H369A, there is no much information about it on Openwrt or other sources except some information on Tech Info Depot, You can check this link for basic information, but it does not have info about CPU, WLAN / Eth Chips, RAM, Flash, etc.
So, I opened the case and her below the additional information I have so far:
Uh, another Broadcom-based device...
According to this (i don't know if this page is up-to-date) , this SoC ist still not supported in OpenWrt.
And considering the lack of open source drivers for Broadcom chips, i don't know if it's a good idea to spend too much time with devices like these...
If i remember right, i think i've seen something like this some years ago on a Broadcom-based set-top-box.
My guess is, they just disabled the normal boot messages or send them straight to /dev/nul.
Edit:
Just found this one.
It seems, that's the typical Broadcom boot log
Edit2:
I was missing the part where there were additional boot messages on other devices, an none on this one...
Either a "security" measure (to secure their intellectual property?) or just "You do not need to know this".
That is also my guess, especially the same problem happens on ZXHN H368N router I have.
In the beginning; I thought it was a serial-TTL cable issue, but when I changed the cable, the problem still there. So it is not a cable issue. I guess they made something with boot-loader security.
The boot-loader is CFE (I think) not U-Boot!
EDIT (1):
Now I am sure it is CFE boot-loader. What I did is I turned off the router then pressed Reset button at start-up for 6 seconds. the router has very tiny webserver in this case (micro_httpd), with telnet to the router on port 80 I got the following
it is clear that it is CFE based bootloader router.
also, when the router is in this mode, you can try 192.168.2.254 on web-browser but it asked for username and password which are unknown. I tried many combinations of username/password but in vain
I got the firmware dump from a NAND programmer, the binary file, I made some investigations and I got the following information
Architecture: ARM Cortex A9 Dual Core Board IP address : 192.168.1.200[:ffffff00] Host IP address : 192.168.1.100 Default host run file name : vmlinux Default host flash file name : bcm963xx_fs_kernel
I would like to run SNAPSHOT image on this router but i do not know how, can someone help.
Any suggestions are appreciated
Here below the full text of some string command run on dump binary file of the firmware
I have successfully extracted some partitions from firmware using binwalk utility,
:~/Documents/ZTE$ binwalk -B flashdata.bin
DECIMAL HEXADECIMAL DESCRIPTION
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1310720 0x140000 JFFS2 filesystem, little endian
11882872 0xB55178 Copyright string: "Copyright (C) 2000-2013 Broadcom Corporation."
11884000 0xB555E0 HTML document header
11884135 0xB55667 HTML document footer
11889708 0xB56C2C PEM DSA private key
11971644 0xB6AC3C CRC32 polynomial table, little endian
11976636 0xB6BFBC HTML document header
11978141 0xB6C59D HTML document footer
11978156 0xB6C5AC HTML document header
11979582 0xB6CB3E HTML document footer
13799848 0xD291A8 Squashfs filesystem, little endian, version 4.0, compression:xz, size: 8269518 bytes, 1236 inodes, blocksize: 131072 bytes, created: 2016-06-09 05:09:52
52777336 0x3255178 Copyright string: "Copyright (C) 2000-2013 Broadcom Corporation."
52778464 0x32555E0 HTML document header
52778599 0x3255667 HTML document footer
52784172 0x3256C2C PEM DSA private key
52866108 0x326AC3C CRC32 polynomial table, little endian
52871100 0x326BFBC HTML document header
52872605 0x326C59D HTML document footer
52872620 0x326C5AC HTML document header
52874046 0x326CB3E HTML document footer
54694312 0x34291A8 Squashfs filesystem, little endian, version 4.0, compression:xz, size: 8269518 bytes, 1236 inodes, blocksize: 131072 bytes, created: 2016-06-09 05:09:52
Afterwards; I was able to extract what is seemed to be the root file system, it is XZ compressed file which can be decompressed by 7z utility
the output of 7z l extractedfs is detailed in this link
If some one interested to help in exploring and trying to port Openwrt to this router, feel free to send me a PM or reply to me here.
UPDATE:
I think source code of CFE and Linux Kernel development for H369A may be deduced / speculated from following repo.
It is true that the Repo is for Asus but the source code needs to be investigated further to see if modifications help in porting OpenWrt to this device
