I got lucky (?) and purchased a Netgear WAC124 with bad erase blocks in
the NAND flash in both the kernel and rootfs partitions. I did not know
this, of course, and attempted to flash OpenWrt 21.02.1, which immediately
resulted in a bricked device. Fortunately, nmrpflash could restore the
vendor firmware, and after a little investigation I found the issue.
There is a patch[1] by Jan Hoffmann <[email protected]> based on work by NOGUCHI
Hiroshi <[email protected]> to parse the Sercomm partition map, which I
have confirmed fixes the problem. (The factory writes a modified
partition map to devices with bad blocks present at manufacturing time.)
The patch was first proposed in June, 2020[2] and again in February,
2021[3]. May I suggest it be applied to both master and the 21.02 branch,
where it applies cleanly? Without it, there is a non-zero chance somebody
will brick their router by trying to install OpenWrt, due to a known bug,
on devices that are advertised to be supported.
I am happy to provide logs or testing if needed. I am also happy to mail
this thing to an OpenWrt developer (for free) if they would like it for
their own testing. I even added a serial port header... -Nathan
[1] https://github.com/janh/openwrt/tree/sercomm-partition-table-v2
[2] http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2020-June/029857.html
[3] http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2021-February/034033.html
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