Hi, I am currently a little bit unsure about the preferred sysupgrade format when an ar71xx device is re-added as ath79 device. I know that there is a migration guide for users [1] but I didn't see one for developers.
First a little bit of background: The OpenMesh devices used the combined
extended image format (CE01) for its factory image (used internally by their
firmware) and the support for sysupgrade was added by Gabor Juhos and Marek
Lindner. Support for this CE01 format was also added to ap51-flash - used
since this point as primary method to flash these kind of devices over the
network. These devices are using a bootloader which checks the vmlinux +
rootfs partition before it boots it and switches to the "other" (recovery)
area if the check failed. And they write to the currently not used area during
a sysupgrade (+ change the boot order in u-boot).
But Matthias Schiffer (in gluon context) didn't like that there was only a
factory image but not sysupgrade image. So I've added a sysupgrade image as
copy of the CE01 factory image. But this ended up as a problem when the first
OpenMesh IPQ40xx devices were added. Mathias Kresin didn't like that there is
(mostly) the same file as factory and sysupgrade file on the servers and that
the sysupgrade file is not using something more common like sysupgrade-tar
[2] to store kernel+rootfs in separate chunks. So he helped to implemented the
sysupgrade-tar support for this kind of dual boot NOR devices and left the
CE01 images as factory image for the IPQ40xx devices.
The OpenMesh company doesn't exist anymore since a while and they cannot be
(officially) bought anymore. But various Freifunk installations are using
these devices. So I have some interest in getting (at least parts) of these
devices working for a while. At least when the dualboot bootloader partition
selection problem is fixed [3] and the NOR flash size is big enough.
Now to the actual question:
What should the OpenMesh devices use as images for ath79:
1. CE01 factory + sysupgrade-tar (like the OpenMesh IPQ40xx devices)
2. CE01 factory + CE01 sysupgrade (like ar71xx)
3. CE01 sysupgrade (like ar71xx but avoid having two files with the same
content)
Kind regards,
Sven
[1] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/ar71xx.to.ath79
[2] Just as info: The sysupgrade-tar script is now creating unbootable images
for IPQ40xx OpenMesh devices in OpenWrt master
https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/3616
[3] https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2020-November/032261.html
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