[MLB-WIRELESS] Commercial: Minitar Replacement - In Stock at Last

[David Ashburner]

>1. The buildroot for the current WhiteRussian version of OpenWRT supports 
>architectures other than Mipsel.  There is already work going on for an AR7 
>version and an i386 version.
>
he he, and a rtl8181 version ( mips big endian)

>2. OpenWRT now uses LZMA compression for it's SquashFS version so you can 
>have quite a functional firmware that is only 1.5MB in size.  OpenWRT works 
>on the 2MB flash version of the LinkSys WAP54G, and my WL-500g has 2MB 
>flash and I'm running OpenWRT on it.  The Minitar has a 2MB flash chip on 
>it.  Hopefully it isn't filled up too much with the bootloader and other 
>necessary stuff.
>
Need to check the way LZMA uncompresses. With 8MB ram I had to change the 
way I was compressing a bzip2 kernel - it allocates buffer space to 
uncompress and was running out of space, so you had to loose some 
compression efficiency and trade off space to get it to not choke on the 
uncompress.

bootloader is tiny < 24 K, there is about 64K of HS, DS and CS stuff that is 
the equivalent of the NVRAM. It's more cumbersome being a c structure that 
is written into flash. In reality though it could all be trashed as it's 
redundant once you have a R/W system image ( as in the jfss2  partition)

>What would be needed is to make an OpenWRT toolchain environment for the 
>RTL8181 - which could be adapted from the RTL8181 sourceforge project.
>
both projects use versions of the buildroot toolchain. The toolchain patches 
from RTL8181 project can be applied as part of the toolchain build

>Also the OpenWRT operating system would need to be adapted to work with the 
>Minitar chipset.  I'm not sure if the Minitar has an NVRAM partition the 
>same as the Broadcom-based routers - if not, perhaps the '/etc/config/' 
>method newly developed to allow OpenWRT support for the Netgear WGT634U 
>router could be used.
>
No, it's different but one could be added pretty easily.

>The benefits of using OpenWRT are huge.  OpenWRT has developed into quite a 
>powerful yet user-friendly operating system for wireless devices.  Lots of 
>packages are available for it - these would need to be re-compiled to work 
>on the Minitar - but the OpenWRT Menuconfig tool makes this pretty easy.
>

I  built the complete set of openwrt packages for the minitar using the 
experimental port a few months ago. These should also run on the RTL8186 
based box Rob is now selling. Built but not tested - anything that interacts 
with the wireless driver too closely may beed some porting work ( a port 
specific patch). The broadcom closed driver sucks big time, it's just so 
non-standard.

The biggest problem is the 8MB of RAM. It's a lot smaller than the 16 you 
would be used to ( half :) so you have to be pretty judicious about what you 
can run. In the Linux image I have been building for the MNWAPB I was still 
running the root filesystem from a ramdisk so that was chewwing some space - 
just haven't got round to moving it to squashfs yet.



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