Current Trunk-Image situation

Hello everyone,

today, it is time to say a statement about the current compatibility against the trunk images.
A forum member sent me his bricked MR3040 and I need to buy a new MR3040v2 and install the trunk image to get PirateBox up and running.
Finally, I was able to install the Software from PirateBox 1.0 without haveing any issues BESIDE

PirateBox won't come up automatically after a reboot.

That causes the following issues:

- Clients can't connect correctly via wifi
- Clients generate an APIPA ip (169.x.x.x) on wired connection
- With static-ip setup, the you sill have no webinterface or anything else.


Yes, I tested it against the current 1.0 packages, that means, that the current 1.0 Packages will not be compatible to any new hardware.
I'm very frustrated and it seems, that I can't find a solution in a short term way.

What I discovered during a small test was:

* init.d process have changed on trunk images (no bootup)
* systemlog logging have changed (no logging during autoinstallation anymore)
* Firewall script changes (no known issues till today)
* IPv6 Changes (no known issues till today. Compatibility of IPv6-Mesh PirateBox stuff in danger)

I'm very unhappy about that situation. But I can't do anything against it in the current situation.
OpenWRT has a long mailing list, that is not giving any hint. There is no documentation on the wiki of OpenWRT nor in the Forum about the changes (and reasons/advices for the changes).
To get over this issue, I have to find everything out with try&error. Beside of this I'm pissed, that you can't find anything about the changes on an OpenSource Project like OpenWRT.

What is the result of the text above:

* Don't use trunk images anymore.
* Don't use trunk images anymore and
* Don't use trunk image.
* Hardware that is only supported by trunk images, We can't support.

Sorry for that.

Matthias

---

This is only my signature.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/15/2013 02:35PM by Matthias.

I already added the note to my hardware compatibility list.

The question is: how to go further on this topic? To support trunk (and with trunk the next release) we need to have to different packages, I think. That is very difficult. *sigh*

If someone has an useful idea. Go ahead, I'm listening

i don't have any knowledge of programming but i have an tl-mr13u which is ready to be tested on!
Piratebox is a great project!
Long live Piratebox!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/15/2013 02:48PM by locobgr.

just collecting things together:
busybox: disable syslogd/klogd by default, procd replaces them

procd (process management daemon) – Technical Reference
This was merged 12 month ago into the OpenWRT project, it maybe it is currently only a bug. But neverthenless we have to align the implementation.. so it seems.

Example implementation changes for ntp

Maybe I can find something useful about that lines somewhere

SERVICE_USE_PID=1 
USE_PROCD=1

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/16/2013 08:12PM by Matthias.

[www.mail-archive.com]

... oh, yes. he is so true

Not sure if this will work or not, and to be honest i'm sure that if it does work you would of thought about it already.
But for routers that require a trunk image, maybe, we could create a community team consisting of experienced openwrt image builders that could create custom images.

I know everyone is busy and don't have alot of free time to devote sometimes so decrease workload and increase productivity for the team I say we do "request service" that basically once we reach a certain, predetermined number of request for a particular router model the team creates an image.

I.E. The minimum number of request for the team to build a custom image for the mr3040 is set at 10.
Once we reach 10 request the team builds the custom image.

Hi Damavox,
if i get your post correctly:

The issue is not about creating custom images, because I created an automatic process, that is doing all the stuff without manual tasks.
The the issue is, that the current trunk image (containing the correct drivers for new devices) has some structural changes, that seems not to work with the current packages.



regards Matthias

Well I was thinking to backport some newer routers back to Atitude adjustment.

Maybe it is an idea, to open a request thread for that?
Or are there plans to make piratebox compatible with Barier Breaker?

Hi,
I'm planning to investigate the issues on the trunk image this week.
We'll see what the exact issue is and how we can fix that

regards Matthias

Cool nice, also I'm going to backport the mr3040v2 as well (also the easiest one of the bunch).
My Openwrt Atitude Adjustment git repo: [github.com]

In a minute I'm going to add some rather useless ones for pb, next will be the mr3040v2 only difference is the slider switch anyways.

An other quick workaround would have been, flash the trunk image on the mr3040v2 and then force flash the AA image of the mr3040v1 (yes that works).

Hi,
are you creating a general backport repository or more like a PirateBox one?

Because, I could add the PirateBox feed in the feeds.conf
But in fact we are using a separate repostiroy beside the normal OpenWRT-package repositories.

lol @ that flashing mr3040v1 over an OpenWRT mr3040v2 works.

Matthias

Just a backport repo, but I could create an PirateBox one and merge the master to pb. Or you could fork it.
I started the regular one, since Attitude Adjustment is still in high demand.

Also have you seen this fix for trunk? [dev.openwrt.org] Also usb 2.0 devices run more stable on platforms using the AR9331 chip.

Also is it only the feeds.conf that is different? or are there more changes done?
I knew that the pb used different package repo's But my knowledge does end there, I have not done much with the piratebox project (time constraints). But I love the project I installed one once.

Because a half year ago I needed one device supported under OpenWrt and not that much help from the people that new how to do it. nebbia88 helped me out by finding the info I needed to find the missing pieces, but he wasn't a dev himself but a wonderfull help

edit: forgot this one :/ [github.com] you allready have a script I could make those packages mandatory in the build process



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2014 06:29AM by FriedZombie.

Hi,
first of all, thank you for contacting us, that we get the possibility to request changes for your work that it will work for PirateBox, too.

That linked patch sounds very interesting, but I assume it won't fix the issues I encountered on the MR3040. In the v1 version of it, I'm able to reproduce a freeze of the USB port leading into a watchdog caused reboot (after a kernel panic). After that, the USB port stays unresponsive but the other parts come up normally
To reproduce it, you have to create a lot of load on the USB port while transfering the data via wifi... I assume that in that case the overall power consumption of the chips are higher then TP-Link expected which causes a voltage drop on the "Usb Port", which leads to an unresponsive USB device.
Because during the tests, I have a stable wifi connection, I'm not believeing that fix above directly solves that.

About PirateBox.
First of all, you can find the repository and other things in generall here: [github.com]
With PirateBo 1.0 we have that repository and all the changes I do on the basic firmware are non invasive or on binary level. I'm using the imagebuilder-pack from OpenWRT to bring my own packages down into the firmware.
First of all, I have one package, that includes our repository into the opkg.conf :
[github.com]
---> pbxopkg_0.0.5_all.ipk

I already created something like an autoinstaller for LibraryBox, which is suitable for PirateBox too. You can find that here:
[github.com]
That installer needes a special folder on the usb stick. If that is found, It installes on the first step the extended mount-point on the usb stick for installing more packages. If you lay down the content of one install.zip on the usb stick, that box-installer script takes it and installs it on the extended mount point. That is (in short) the way how the automatic installation works.

That package is included into our repository & feed, too .. [github.com]

For preparing our images I'm using the make-file included into that repository: [github.com] (watch out for the different branches).

That we can use your AA-backport version, I totally need a fully (containing our needed packages) equiped imagebuilder bundle, like OpenWRT is providing it.


I have not much time this morning, so I hope I gave you an impression and pointed out, that we don't change much within the OpenWRT itself and try to stay close at the normal sources.

If you want to know more, or something was confusing - don't hestinate ask !

best regards
Matthias

Thank you for the warm welcome and happy to help out

Well currently charging my mr3040 and lets see what happens

Also I don't see the point of the image builder really, if buildroot includes the needed packages and feeds it will be ok? or am I missing something?

And thank you for the detailed info

after looking trough the [wiki.openwrt.org] page, it is simple to build the image builder.

Allready backported some devices and came accross this one. I think it would make a nice PirateBox

[nl.tp-link.com]



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2014 07:43PM by FriedZombie.

I'm using the "imagebuilder"-setup to get away from self compiling AND - which is the most important fact - I stay compatible to all the kernel-packages in the official repositories.
So advanced users, who need more kernel packages maybe, can use the official stable ones (in case of AA, they are totally stable).

---

To get back to the topic about trunk-compatibility:

I did some work on this today, I found out the following issues:

* The reason why people are loosing their internet connectivity on trunk images, while installing piratebox. That is easy to be fixed. The cause is, that during wifi and firewall-refresh OpenWRT now does a complete network initialization. This causes the already changes made during configuration get to early active. The flaw of that fix, piratebox will only work after the first reboot.... not so big.

* The piratebox init.d file is not recognized during bootup as expected. If I copy over the init file by hand, during the next bootup everything works like expected. It seems, that OpenWRT changed the way how they recognize the files for start-stop procedures with implementing the new procd stuff. I'm going to write an E-Mail to the openwrt-devel group

Matthias



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2014 08:41PM by Matthias.

Here is my e-mail to the devel-mailling list:

[lists.openwrt.org]

Yeah, I have seen that mail fly by. Also I vaguely remember reading more or less the same one a while back.
I don't remember if it was on the openwrt mail list or forum though.

Anyway, I think I will look into that issue as well this week since I don't really have an answer yet

And now for some offtopic stuff:

I tested a mr3040 with an usb stick with OpenWrt ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT (12.09, r36088) the one downloaded via the imagebuilder or downloaded on: downloads.openwrt.org/attitude_adjustment/12.09/ar71xx/generic/

Test setup:
wa850 (client) <-> mr3040v1 (ap)
Philips USB Flash Drive 4Gb pid: 13fe vid: 3600 plugged into the mr3040v1
1x 39Ohm resistor over the the usb powerleads to add an additional 130 miliAmps
The load of the resistor + usb drive totalling out at 210 MiliAmps

commands used:
while :; do time -v dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda conv=sync bs=1M; done (mr3040v1)
iperf -s (wa850)
iperf -c 192.168.1.2 -i1 -t 18000 (mr3040v1)

Results:
Test total runtime: 68:15 minutes (battery was dead after this).
Iperf avarage: 21.8867 Mbits/sec
dd avarage: 31.0824 Mbits/sec

The usb and wifi worked fine without failure (until the battery was empty).
The usb voltage ranged from 4.91 to 4.89 Volts the other pheripherals didn't effect the voltage. it slowly went down when the battery got more empty over time.

Well at least I learned from this that the mr3040 under full load runs for at least an hour.
The cpu usage doesn't do a lot for the total powerconsumption anyways.

Managed to crash it, it can happen when a client connects or deconnect (still no powerdip though).



Edited 10 time(s). Last edit at 01/20/2014 07:45PM by FriedZombie.

Congratulations!

you impressed totally!! Thanks for investigating this.

I used

# 1 MR3040v1 running on battery
# 1 Client connected by wifi
# 1 serial attached computer to see kernel messages

I used a webserver / ftp server for transfering the data and run 3 up to 5 processes downloading the same file from the usb stick. The file itself has to have more then 100 MB that one process downloading takes a while.

Well, in less then 5 Minutes the device initiated the reboot out of an kernel panic.
That was the way how I "killed" my MR3040 on purpose

Ah well it does help if you have the right gear I had a scope hooked up. And a voltmeter with a trigger set on 4.40 volts (lower limmit of the usb spec). I couldn't directly find my pc inteface lead, otherwise I also had a slightly boring graph to post
And the serial output of the mr3040 was boring (also no warnings).

But the kernel panic does this also happen on the (latest) trunk release of OpenWrt?



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2014 04:49AM by FriedZombie.

I made the newly backported device availlable for download

To make the firmware images compatible with the official repo I added a fake kernel magic to the build, the kernel magic is close enough to properly work with the official package repo anyways.

Also I build an image builder.

Image builder AA with the older fw2 and opkg618 packages to make it work with the stable PirateBox release
image builder AA
all new backported firmware images AA

New backported PirateBox custom images

Should I also create an image builder lite? with just the relevant packages?

Is it maybe an idea to change mtd -r write *.bin firmware to sysupgrade -n *.bin in the tutorials? because this also works and if someone tries to flash the incorrect firmware it throws a nice error
Maybe an uci-defaults script could be added to remove settings if someone had openwrt previously and didn't specify the don't keep settings option.



Edited 8 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2014 03:11PM by FriedZombie.

Hi,
thank you very much, with flowers, chockolade and everything!!

Awesome.

I still have to test that, it is on my todo list, which was intercepted by the inner strong voice to help occupy.here with better packaging and using the PirateBox framework (75% done within 5 hours )

let us discuss the thing about sysupgrade, factory reset and the "nice uci" comands, in a different thread. maybe that needs a bit too much offoptic discussion for that thread.

About the question with you imagebuilder: Ususally I say, leave only the needed packages into the file, but after adding more and more stuff around on different projects, I would prefer a -near-to-openwrt-package- even more.

BTW: What I forgot to mention is, that the openwrt-image-builder is pointing to stable.openwrt.piratebox.de containing the current packages, you should exchange that URL to beta.openwrt.piratebox.de for testing purposes and the latest version.

regards
Matthias

Ah, another update on the Trunk-image situation.

Haven't got any reply from the OpenWRT folk up till today

To be honest, I don't think you are going to get an reply on that question. Simply because it is hard to answer without looking at the extendroot code.

Also I created two sets of custom pbx images with backported devices (that work).
The backports where from Barier breaker to Attitude Adjustment

# PBX 1.0 (PBX stable branch)
# PBX 2.0 (PBX beta branch with the auto installer)

Also the new images do include some other backported bugfixes as well.
Custom images that are availlable for download:

# tl-mr10u-v1
# tl-mr11u-v1
# tl-mr11u-v2
# tl-mr13u-v1
# tl-mr3020-v1
# tl-mr3040-v1
# tl-mr3040-v2
# tl-wr1043nd-v1
# tl-wr703n-v1
# tl-wr842n-v1

P.s. I really love Warsteiner as well



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2014 08:21PM by FriedZombie.

You are from nederlands, right?
Ahh that is not that far away

About my question in the mailing list, I can some up in one sentence, request:

can you make the init process to recognize symlinks again?

That is all. That is how it works like before

edit:
Other question is, will it work, when I include my stuff into config/fstab that it is mounted one step earlier???

edit2:
I'm pissed about the procd stuff, because it is so badly documented... and this for a very central point of the system. So, I wish more support.

edit3:
Is there a way for bunch downloading from google-drive *sigh* , I hate it after 5 seconds already XD

btw: I like Becks even more



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2014 08:15PM by Matthias.

Yeah I'm from the Netherlands

Also if it is only the symlinks that aren't started it probably not that hard to figure out why, I will look into that.
Support from the mailinglist or forum is somewhat selective in my opinion and OpenWrt isn't the best documented. But I have seen worse (way worse).

if it will work if you put it in config/fstab? not a clue have to look into that.

Well if it is your own google drive you can sellect the files you want to download, and not just one at a time.
But as guest, it is one at a time (apparently) so i created two "all files.zip" files.

Becks is really nice as well

Quote

But as guest, it is one at a time (apparently) so i created two "all files.zip" files.

That would be very nice! So I'm planning to upload them on my piratebox.de side

thanks for investigating!

Quote

That would be very nice! So I'm planning to upload them on my piratebox.de side

Sounds better then my google drive

PBX 1.0 all files.zip
PBX 2.0 all files.zip

Hi!
Thank you!
I already uploaded them to my webspace. I want to do one final test for my self for each "brand" of the images, then I move them into the public folder.

I hope I can do that this evening.

Best wishes, and thank you for you work!
Matthias

Hi,
I'm just poking around with the 2.0 named image files. A few requests/bugs I found:

  _______                     ________        __
 |       |.-----.-----.-----.|  |  |  |.----.|  |_
 |   -   ||  _  |  -__|     ||  |  |  ||   _||   _|
 |_______||   __|_____|__|__||________||__|  |____|
          |__| W I R E L E S S   F R E E D O M
 -----------------------------------------------------
 ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT (12.09, r39154)
 -----------------------------------------------------
  * 1/4 oz Vodka      Pour all ingredients into mixing
  * 1/4 oz Gin        tin with ice, strain into glass.
  * 1/4 oz Amaretto
  * 1/4 oz Triple sec
  * 1/4 oz Peach schnapps
  * 1/4 oz Sour mix
  * 1 splash Cranberry juice
 -----------------------------------------------------
root@OpenWrt:/#

Please adjust the version number. You may find the origin or use the menuconfig option of the image-configuration.

Can you please create for 2.0 the AA-auto-install version with the auto installer included. That is crucial for the easy auto install option.

for that you have to do the following steps

* checkout the "AA-with-installer" branch within the openwrt-image-build
* include the new build targets into Makefile , you maybe can use cherry-pick
* Adjust Imagebuilder url (or simply bring the file named like "ImageBuilder.tar.bz2" in place
* run

make all  INSTALL_TARGET=piratebox

Optional, you can build a new install.zip, but that isn't really required

make install_zip INSTALL_TARGET=piratebox

Thank you

best wishes
Matthias

This sounds cool, like by it is working a treat