Hello, all. I've started some work on this chip. The actual hardware is a noname 'EDUP' pocket router from china, which is similar to TRENDnet TEW-652BRP, which I got the SDK from. I hooked the serial console, and identified the hardware. It's a nice 390Mhz SoC (according to bootloader output), 32 MiB RAM and a 4 MiB SPI Flash, where the firmware resides. USB 2.0 EHCI also works fine. Flashing is just about the same way as for asus wl520GU - reset on boot + tftp. The original firmware was based on 2.4 kernel, but I forgot to hook an avr and make a backup of that before I loaded TRENDnets firmware. The TRENDnets SDK has a 2.6.30.9 kernel. Anyway, I've managed to get the toolchain and SDK running and he firmware assembled booted fine there, so I went on to see if an openwrt port was possible. And here goes trouble. First, the toolchain, prefixed as 'rsdk-linux-' is actually a mips-linux, but with some harware specific fixes from realtek. Thanks for sfstudio from Wive-ng project for pointing that out. Compiling toolchain from source is pain: it requires several patches to compile, and crashes gcc with stack overflow when linking libgcc.a on some versions. I've managed to get that working with gcc 4.2 on a 32-bit system, while other gcc versions failed. Second, the kernel. This is the place, where really bad things are made. arch/mips is copied to arch/rlx and all the code is put there. The kernel tree is stuffed with hacks and symlinks out of the build tree. The resulting thing cannot be compiled outside the SDK and it will take time, to figure out what they've done out there.
So, my questions here are: 1. Has anyone been working on these SoCs already? 2. What is the best way to put this all together with openwrt? At first, I wanted to make openwrt build system to produce just the squashfs filesystem, with no kernel, and fool the SDK to pack that into the firmware with openwrt rootfs, but as I soon found out, unlike buildroot openwrt cannot make just a rootfs with no kernel. (May be some unobvious hack possible?) While now, I'm trying to make a somewhat usable kernel tree, but that will take time. According to 'sfstudio' from Wive-NG project their code in kernel is... well... worse, than one can imagine. 3. What is the best way, to put the toolchain compilation in openwrt. Even with my patches applied, that may not compile on several gcc versions I have. Regards, Andrew _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openwrt.org/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
