"Why would the OpenWRT k6.1 version not include Luci?"
Snapshot releases never include Luci. You have to add it later.
I don't know if Openwrt snapshot + luci would fit - and I'm not game to try. _________________ ------------------------------------
Linksys WRT3200ACM DD-WRT r55819 (Gateway)
Linksys EA8500 OpenWrt-23.05.3 (Wired AP)
Netgear WNDR3700v4 DD-WRT r55819 (spare Gateway)
Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nickant44/albums
"Why would the OpenWRT k6.1 version not include Luci?"
Snapshot releases never include Luci. You have to add it later.
I don't know if Openwrt snapshot + luci would fit - and I'm not game to try.
I am no expert on openwrt, but the thing is, Luci would not be installed on the same partition the kernel resides, so this should be a non-issue I would suspect. The EA8500 has a total of 128MB of flash storage. Userspace apps and the kernel are installed onto different MTD partitions within this space. The latest releases of DD-WRT for this router are around 27MB x 2 = ~54MB total. There should be plenty of space.
I am still leaning on an error in the partition layout(s) and not on the space requirements. Glad you are still pursuing this issue. I have not even bothered trying the last 4-5 releases at this point. Until something specific regarding the EA8500 shows up in the code tracker, there is no need to try. _________________ Linksys EA8500 (Internet Gateway, AP/VAP) - DD-WRT r53562
Features in use: WDS-AP, Multiple VLANs, Samba, WireGuard, Entware: mqtt, mlocate
Wireless 5ghz only
Netgear R7800 (WDS-AP, WAP, VAP) - DD-WRT r55779
Features in use: multiple VLANs over single trunk port
Linksys EA8500 WDS Station x2 - DD-WRT r55799
Netgear R6400v2 WAP, VAP 2.4ghz only w/VLANs over single trunk port. DD-WRT r55779
OSes: Fedora 38, 9 RPis (2,3,4,5), 20 ESP8266s: Straight from Amiga to Linux in '94, never having owned a Windows PC.
At this stage my EA8500 will stay on Openwrt as an AP - I'm fine with that until such time BS can resolve its issues.
I'm visualizing this as being a game of Tetris, with various shapes of memory trying to fit K6.1 in there and not quite making it - until they do.
My XR500 will eventually find its way back to DD-WRT. _________________ ------------------------------------
Linksys WRT3200ACM DD-WRT r55819 (Gateway)
Linksys EA8500 OpenWrt-23.05.3 (Wired AP)
Netgear WNDR3700v4 DD-WRT r55819 (spare Gateway)
Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nickant44/albums
Joined: 18 Mar 2014 Posts: 12922 Location: Netherlands
Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2024 6:49 Post subject:
Well for OpenWRT questions and support you have to go to the OpenWRT site.
But Snapshot builds (K6.1) never incorporate Luci you have to install that afterwards.
My EA8500 runs fine on OpenWRT snapshot/K6.1 with Luci, OpenVPN, WireGuard, Adblock and BanIP
I think DDWRT also enlarged the space for the Kernel (maybe that is the problem, who knows)
"Why would the OpenWRT k6.1 version not include Luci?"
Snapshot releases never include Luci. You have to add it later.
I don't know if Openwrt snapshot + luci would fit - and I'm not game to try.
I am no expert on openwrt, but the thing is, Luci would not be installed on the same partition the kernel resides, so this should be a non-issue I would suspect. The EA8500 has a total of 128MB of flash storage. Userspace apps and the kernel are installed onto different MTD partitions within this space. The latest releases of DD-WRT for this router are around 27MB x 2 = ~54MB total. There should be plenty of space.
I am still leaning on an error in the partition layout(s) and not on the space requirements. Glad you are still pursuing this issue. I have not even bothered trying the last 4-5 releases at this point. Until something specific regarding the EA8500 shows up in the code tracker, there is no need to try.
I don't know for certain if this is related or not, but after updating to 55009, my Netgear r7800 bricked after the second reboot (the automatic reboot after the update went smoothly. The second reboot I did by hand from the admin control panel bricked it.) Wifi radios would not turn on and LAN ports were inaccessible. No amount of rebooting would get it working again and factory reset did not help. I was able to recover it with tftp by flashing back to stock firmware and everything is working again.
For now, I'm probably just going to go back to the last 4.9 kernel build since it does seem most of the issues I've been having with dd-wrt on the r7800 started with the switch to kernel 6.
I don't know for certain if this is related or not, but after updating to 55009, my Netgear r7800 bricked after the second reboot (the automatic reboot after the update went smoothly. The second reboot I did by hand from the admin control panel bricked it.) Wifi radios would not turn on and LAN ports were inaccessible. No amount of rebooting would get it working again and factory reset did not help. I was able to recover it with tftp by flashing back to stock firmware and everything is working again.
For now, I'm probably just going to go back to the last 4.9 kernel build since it does seem most of the issues I've been having with dd-wrt on the r7800 started with the switch to kernel 6.
No idea if this could be related. Might be. I have not seen or heard any other R7800 owners complaining about this issue. I have not yet tried a k6.1 build on my R7800. Honestly, Atheros k6.1 builds seem to be an absolute mess at the moment. Kudos for those who continue testing them with non-working LEDs, samba crashing at first access among a plethora of other problems.
Absolutely, some people are having near zero issues, but it's only because they are not actually using the features available to them.
The main difference between the R7800 and the EA8500 is the 7800 has only one boot partition, whereas the EA8500 has two. The 8500 will eventually switch to the other partition after so many boot failures. The 7800 will not.
Just reporting that your router bricked without providing a serial log helps nobody. Perhaps something in your log could actually help fix both routers. If would be very useful to go back to the build that bricked your router and repeat what you did before to brick it, but actually capture and provide a serial log for it. I am sure your router was booting to some point before crashing, over and over again. Would be nice to actually see what happened. _________________ Linksys EA8500 (Internet Gateway, AP/VAP) - DD-WRT r53562
Features in use: WDS-AP, Multiple VLANs, Samba, WireGuard, Entware: mqtt, mlocate
Wireless 5ghz only
Netgear R7800 (WDS-AP, WAP, VAP) - DD-WRT r55779
Features in use: multiple VLANs over single trunk port
Linksys EA8500 WDS Station x2 - DD-WRT r55799
Netgear R6400v2 WAP, VAP 2.4ghz only w/VLANs over single trunk port. DD-WRT r55779
OSes: Fedora 38, 9 RPis (2,3,4,5), 20 ESP8266s: Straight from Amiga to Linux in '94, never having owned a Windows PC.
Just reporting that your router bricked without providing a serial log helps nobody. Perhaps something in your log could actually help fix both routers. If would be very useful to go back to the build that bricked your router and repeat what you did before to brick it, but actually capture and provide a serial log for it. I am sure your router was booting to some point before crashing, over and over again. Would be nice to actually see what happened.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to hook a serial terminal up to it. So as far as I knew at the time, the only thing I could do was flash to something that I knew would work. What I can say for sure though, is that I did not make any configuration changes before I rebooted. The only reason I rebooted was because I was seeing this weird situation where a single MAC address was showing up as having two valid DHCP leases with two different IP addresses. I'd never seen that before. After the reboot, it was bricked. I agree it was booting to some point and then hanging.
Anyway, given this is my production router and I don't have a backup router I can put in place if it bricks again, I can't really afford the downtime of trying to see to see if I can make it happen again and then having to recover it again.
Well this is somewhat some good news. While things are still not perfect, r55109 DOES eventually boot on the EA8500. After flashing it to partition 2 the first time, writing over r53562, after about 9 attempts it did boot. Now normally at this point, after changing the login credentials and rebooting, it would boot loop forever again and erase NVRAM. While it does kernel dump once or twice on the reboot, it does reboot. I then made some simple changes, such as Wifi settings, IP address, dhcp etc, rebooted and it actually came back up with one preceeding kernel dump. Many times actually which is completely different that what we have seen in the past.
I have not yet flashed onto Part1 at this point. I am worried this will totally break things but I won't know until I try. Sigh. _________________ Linksys EA8500 (Internet Gateway, AP/VAP) - DD-WRT r53562
Features in use: WDS-AP, Multiple VLANs, Samba, WireGuard, Entware: mqtt, mlocate
Wireless 5ghz only
Netgear R7800 (WDS-AP, WAP, VAP) - DD-WRT r55779
Features in use: multiple VLANs over single trunk port
Linksys EA8500 WDS Station x2 - DD-WRT r55799
Netgear R6400v2 WAP, VAP 2.4ghz only w/VLANs over single trunk port. DD-WRT r55779
OSes: Fedora 38, 9 RPis (2,3,4,5), 20 ESP8266s: Straight from Amiga to Linux in '94, never having owned a Windows PC.
Forum member #248
Last edited by lexridge on Sun Feb 11, 2024 17:44; edited 1 time in total
the "[code]" command is not working apparently. I would never have posted the previous message like that intentionally, sorry....and it's missing some shit too.
EDIT: It was updated with a log attachment instead. _________________ Linksys EA8500 (Internet Gateway, AP/VAP) - DD-WRT r53562
Features in use: WDS-AP, Multiple VLANs, Samba, WireGuard, Entware: mqtt, mlocate
Wireless 5ghz only
Netgear R7800 (WDS-AP, WAP, VAP) - DD-WRT r55779
Features in use: multiple VLANs over single trunk port
Linksys EA8500 WDS Station x2 - DD-WRT r55799
Netgear R6400v2 WAP, VAP 2.4ghz only w/VLANs over single trunk port. DD-WRT r55779
OSes: Fedora 38, 9 RPis (2,3,4,5), 20 ESP8266s: Straight from Amiga to Linux in '94, never having owned a Windows PC.
Forum member #248
Last edited by lexridge on Mon Feb 12, 2024 4:06; edited 1 time in total
While it did survive multiple warm reboots, it did not survive a cold boot (power cycle). Once a power cycle is done, it goes back to boot looping about 10 times until it erases NVRAM again. Back to square one. Damn! _________________ Linksys EA8500 (Internet Gateway, AP/VAP) - DD-WRT r53562
Features in use: WDS-AP, Multiple VLANs, Samba, WireGuard, Entware: mqtt, mlocate
Wireless 5ghz only
Netgear R7800 (WDS-AP, WAP, VAP) - DD-WRT r55779
Features in use: multiple VLANs over single trunk port
Linksys EA8500 WDS Station x2 - DD-WRT r55799
Netgear R6400v2 WAP, VAP 2.4ghz only w/VLANs over single trunk port. DD-WRT r55779
OSes: Fedora 38, 9 RPis (2,3,4,5), 20 ESP8266s: Straight from Amiga to Linux in '94, never having owned a Windows PC.
What exactly happens with a power cycle that is different from a hot reboot, on this router? The only thing that I can think of is the RAM gets wiped/erased. The EEPROM should not be affected at all...including NVRAM. Right? With a hot reboot, the RAM is not necessarily or explicitly erased.
I am wondering why whenever I change settings, and do a successful warm reboots over and over again, my changes stay put and it boots (with only one or two crashes). But a cold boot, it's all over.
This tells me my settings are only being saved in RAM somewhere which is not erased with warm reboots, until a power down situation. It's the only thing that really makes sense.
What is happening now is reproducible and predictable. Hopefully this may help lead to a fix.
Thoughts? _________________ Linksys EA8500 (Internet Gateway, AP/VAP) - DD-WRT r53562
Features in use: WDS-AP, Multiple VLANs, Samba, WireGuard, Entware: mqtt, mlocate
Wireless 5ghz only
Netgear R7800 (WDS-AP, WAP, VAP) - DD-WRT r55779
Features in use: multiple VLANs over single trunk port
Linksys EA8500 WDS Station x2 - DD-WRT r55799
Netgear R6400v2 WAP, VAP 2.4ghz only w/VLANs over single trunk port. DD-WRT r55779
OSes: Fedora 38, 9 RPis (2,3,4,5), 20 ESP8266s: Straight from Amiga to Linux in '94, never having owned a Windows PC.
This tells me my settings are only being saved in RAM somewhere which is not erased with warm reboots, until a power down situation. It's the only thing that really makes sense.
What is happening now is reproducible and predictable. Hopefully this may help lead to a fix.
Thoughts?[/quote]
The only thing I can come up with that might match that description is programming the memory controller timing and other memory mmapping related parameters by the boot ROM.
