Am 04.10.2014 um 03:43 schrieb Stefan Monnier:
AFAICT OpenWRT comes with some support for the Hame MPR-A1 thingy (although its 16MB of RAM and 4MB of flash probably prevent it from being fully supported).
Yes, the MPR-A1 is supported. Also fully so, but it's pretty much impossible to get LuCI to work on it with acceptable performance at just 16MB of RAM.
The page for MPR-A2 (whose hardware and firmware seem very similar) says that the image can be installed via the factory web UI. Does someone know if that would work for the MPR-A1 as well?
Probably not. As far as I remember at least some MPR-A1 use a kind of XOR obfuscation to "encrypt" their firmware image. We implemented a tool to create or extract these kind of images called mkporayfw (hint: it's in tools/firmware-utils, if you successfully completed a build already you should find binaries for it in build_dir/host/firmware-utils/bin). You use it like this to create a factory image for the MPR-A1:
./mkporayfw -B MPR-A1 -f <path to your MPR-A1 squashfs-sysupgrade.bin> -o <output-filename.bin>
I wonder why no one got around to implementing the automatic generation of obfuscated images in target/linux/ramips/image/Makefile like we did for the Poray boards.
And if it doesn't work, would it just immediately fail, leaving the factory firmware untouched, or would it result in an unbootable machine (and if so would it be recoverable via the serial console)?
That I don't know. I never owned a MPR-A1. But what these devices have in common is that they all use Ralink's u-boot. That means you will be able to recover from a bad flash using the console for input and TFTP for file transfer (unless you overwrite the bootloader in flash on purpose or by accident, although I never had that happen to me while heavily fiddling around with all the other RT5350 boards I have.) My guess would be it will fail if obfuscation is active on your board's factory firmware and the image has the incorrect checksum after obfuscation or wasn't obfuscated at all. If the checksum is correct it will probably flash whatever you throw at it. That means that you might very well render your board unbootable (also in the extended sense of board does boot but no network connection to it is possible) but not unrecoverable. However, the images built through the OpenWrt build system should generally boot okay.
Regards, Felix _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
