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Topic: OpenWRT for Linksys EA6500 / EA6700

The content of this topic has been archived on 25 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

Hi guys,

any word about OpenWRT running with the latest Linksys EA6300 / EA6400 / EA6500 / EA6700 series, please?

Thanks.

  1. Booting should be supported

  2. Flashes should be supported

  3. USB 3.0 probably not supported

  4. Ethernet - depends. I've seen some PHY errors on 802.11ac device with bgmac

  5. BCM4360 (and very similar BCM4352) not supported

  6. BCM43217 - I would love to know what is that. Need some logs to say something more about this radio.

Hello Zajec, thanks for the reply.

- USB 3.0 I presume this is only a matter of time. I can live with 2.0 for now, even with only one port...
- Broadcom BCM43217 2x2 802.11b/g/n transceiver is a 2.4GHz radio, used in EA6300 / EA6400. EA6500 / EA6700 should use the BCM4331
- is there a table of supported radio chipsets, please?
- No need for 802.11ac.
- BCM4360 not supported: Are you sure? Asus RT-AC66N seems to have the same chipset and from what I've heard, DD-WRT is runnig there, so I presume, OpenWRT should as well. Or not?

I would like to have this HW because: USB 3.0, 3x3 instead of 2x2, Gigabit WLAN, CPU able to encrypt higher VPN/IPSec transfer rates. I would prefer to stay with one device for at least few years. Money's not the issue. The HW capability and support for OpenWRT is. Any ideas / updates folks, please?

Thanks.

jojoii wrote:

- USB 3.0 I presume this is only a matter of time. I can live with 2.0 for now, even with only one port...

Yeah, shouldn't be too hard to support

jojoii wrote:

- Broadcom BCM43217 2x2 802.11b/g/n transceiver is a 2.4GHz radio, used in EA6300 / EA6400.

Yeah, but we still have no idea what's inside of that chipset. Generally chipset-specific code is in "bcma" and is quite small. The problem is supporting wireless core, which requires huge per-PHY code. So to know if WiFi support for BCM43217 is possible, we need to know what PHY is inside.

jojoii wrote:

EA6500 / EA6700 should use the BCM4331

Yes, that should be easier to support with b43 (quite a lot of code is already there), but I'm not sure about performance.

jojoii wrote:

- is there a table of supported radio chipsets, please?

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

jojoii wrote:

- BCM4360 not supported: Are you sure? Asus RT-AC66N seems to have the same chipset and from what I've heard, DD-WRT is runnig there, so I presume, OpenWRT should as well. Or not?

DD-WRT is using closed-source wl driver (they have access to the source, so can compile it against any kernel).

According to this list: http://wikidevi.com/wiki/List_of_802.11ac_Hardware the EA6300, EA6400 and EA6700 are using a ARM based BCM4708 SoCs. The EA6500 is MIPS based and uses a BCM4706. All the Broadcom devices with USB 3.0 support are using a ARM SoC and they are not supported by OpenWrt, OpenWrt will not even boot. The EA6500 should work with OpenWrt more or less at least Ethernet, no Wifi.

I am interested in the new ARM based Broadcom BCM470X SoCs, but they are pretty expensive, the cheapest I could find here was the Linksys EA6400 for 140 Euro.

Hauke wrote:

According to this list: http://wikidevi.com/wiki/List_of_802.11ac_Hardware the EA6300, EA6400 and EA6700 are using a ARM based BCM4708 SoCs.

Wow, I didn't notice that.
Any idea about that ARM support? Is that still bcma bus? Do we just need new code in arch/arm/ or also new drivers?

It is a Broadcom ARM SoC, here are some informations:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5925/broa … ac-routers

It seams to use the ai bus (bcma) in a little bit modified version.
The operating system shared code is structured the same as for mips so I would hope we just need some little modifications to bcma to make that part work.
Then there is new platform code for arm needed. This platform code also contains some Ethernet mac driver so it could be that bgmac will not work.

Source code for these SoC is available from Linksys and from Netgear:
ftp://downloads.netgear.com/files/GPL/R … rc.tar.zip

Lightsword, thanks a lot for your post.

Managed to recompile EA6700 firmware with dropbear.

Router has like 64 megs of JFFS storage!!!!!

working on porting IPKG to it.

andlommy wrote:

Lightsword, thanks a lot for your post.

Managed to recompile EA6700 firmware with dropbear.

Router has like 64 megs of JFFS storage!!!!!

working on porting IPKG to it.

If you get the chance you should upload the images so others can try them out and maybe get openwrt ported.

andlommy wrote:

Lightsword, thanks a lot for your post.

Managed to recompile EA6700 firmware with dropbear.

Router has like 64 megs of JFFS storage!!!!!

working on porting IPKG to it.

BTW what did you need to do to enable dropbear support? Was there a config option for it?

(Last edited by Lightsword on 21 Oct 2013, 14:52)

i just compiled dropbear from source you supplied, put it on flashdrive and added some script into the startup sequence.

Now i made it better - i put dropbear into firmware (removed some linksys rubbish to make things fit) and put tools i need into the large JFFS we have. I then redirect /opt to JFFS and kick off some init-scripts from that /opt during startup. Now i have openvpn server, my own custom firewall scripts (linksys's vision of firewalling is a nightmare) and dropbear.

(Last edited by andlommy on 3 Nov 2013, 22:59)

Any news on this?

see the second post
Point1-4 might be easy but
Wireless would not work because Broadcom did not releasing open drivers (brcmfmac or brcmsmac) the 2 components since
the thread started - if they are supported one would find entries for patches in
- mailing list/mailing list archives
- git trees

A recent message from linux-wireless mailing list (2013-11-12):

On 11/12/2013 01:13 PM, Alessandro Gnagni wrote:
> Hi,
> i am trying to implement on a smart city network a solution based on
> high end home routers like the asus RT-AC66U.
> we want to use openwrt for that but unfortunately the broadcom driver
> isn't yet supported.
> I have one rt-ac66u here for development, there is anything that i can
> do for help?
> i came here after a suggestion of one member on openwrt forum:
> https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php … 41#p217341
>
> i also read this past email:
> http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-wire … 10443.html

Not sure what 11ac chipset is used. The upstream brcm80211 drivers
currently only support one 11ac chipset, ie. the bcm4335. This is a
single stream with SDIO host interface supported by the fullmac driver
brcmfmac.

For chipsets like 4360 we need to add AC phy support to brcmsmac. So far
we do not have green light to do so.

Regards,
Arend

in response to a question regarding support for recent Asus router (uses Broadcom too)

If you want real OpenWrt you are out of luck at the moment.

This router uses a very different chipset from the rt-ac66u that one is mips this is arm, most info is probably not all that applicable from the rt-ac66u. The rt-ac68u however is the similar arm router from asus. Those missing components are built into the binary drivers that reside in GPL tarballs, probably best to just try and patch those to work if possible anything else is probably too complicated unless broadcom releases better source. You can get a good amount of information by decompiling the drivers but actually reimplementing components could be tricky.

Do not understand English are translated GOOGLE
This is the morning of my hand LINKSYS EA6500 v1 version of DD-WRT guide the brush out of the CFE \
Link address: http://page1.yunfile.com/fs/3comfmon0cbaa92/
Or you can directly email me (starballl@gmail.com), the theme noted EA6500 on the line!
Do not know if you can understand No, I do not understand English.

Any word/news on getting OpenWRT support for the masses on the EA6700?
I have (had) at least) an open case with the hopless LinkSys support for IPv6 not working, and time zone not support among others. Currently using my old Asus WL500GP2 with OpenWRT.

There are some changes, but it still requires some work. Nice recent work by Hauke:
http://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt.git;a … 4e8f6d5dfe

I still would like someone to provide output of

wl -i eth1 revinfo
wl -i eth2 revinfo
wl -i wl0 revinfo
wl -i wl1 revinfo

(Using original firmware or DD-WRT).

have been looking for how to gain root shell access to execute these commands with Orig Linksys Firmware. Is this possable, and how ?

Every Linksys (and Netgear) firmware I tested got a free root access over serial console. Nothing was blocked.

Anyway, I noticed my R6250 has such a chipset as well. It has appeared to be 14e4:a8db with BCM43217. It uses radio 0x2057, unfortunately it's revision is 0xE (14). I don't know how to add support for such radio revision sad

(Last edited by Zajec on 30 Jun 2014, 23:05)

Zajec wrote:

Every Linksys (and Netgear) firmware I tested got a free root access over serial console. Nothing was blocked.

Anyway, I noticed my R6250 has such a chipset as well. It has appeared to be 14e4:a8db with BCM43217. It uses radio 0x2057, unfortunately it's revision is 0xE (14). I don't know how to add support for such radio revision sad

OK, I have order several USB to serial converters to gain serial port(console) access. Been looking for any info about where the serial port (s) might be on this motherboard. Any info on this ?

regards.

No. Just Google, maybe someone already found it and posted. Otherwise look for some free pins, usually 4 of them in a block. Find a GND, try others for Rx/Tx. Remember that:
Serial Tx <-> Router Rx
Serial Rx <-> Router Tx

Btw. I've already found PCIe device with BCM43217 and it's already supported in b43.

Hi,

Did anyone actually install OpenWRT on EA6500 ? If not what was the last step done...
I am thinking of buying one and could play a bit (I ported OpenWrt to 2 routers before but they were atheros based...)

jaceq wrote:

Hi,

Did anyone actually install OpenWRT on EA6500 ? If not what was the last step done...
I am thinking of buying one and could play a bit (I ported OpenWrt to 2 routers before but they were atheros based...)

If you make any progresse please share because I have this router and would love to put OpenWRT on it.

The discussion might have continued from here.