[Commotion-dev] TPLink w3040

[Ben West]

Hi Saemus,

I've still been tooling around with squeezing meshing firmware image onto a
similar TP-Link TL-MR3020, which also has 4MB flash.  I'm just about to the
point where I can get the kernel, basic filesystem, and even a coovachilli
captive portal into 4MB, but I've had to do / am doing the following:

- Add the "-funit-at-a-time" compile optimiization flag, and use GCC v4.7.
This basically tells GCC to work harder at reducing compiled code size, and
maybe yields 5-10% smaller images.

- Swap out libopenssl for libcyassl for use with curl.  (If you're using
curl.)  I can share the patches for this if you'd like.

- While retaining IPv6 support in the kernel, switch all IPv6-related
packages over to modules not included with the compile image.

- Select "Compressed source" or "Pre-compiled source" for the luci lua
source files.  Theorectically, this reduces the space used by all the Luci
web UI source files, although I've been able to observe and significant
image size decrease with this.

- Port the IBSS-RSN stuff from hostapd + wpa_supplicant over to one of the
smaller packages like wpad-mini.  (Not done yet.)

Note that installing *.ipk files from a mounted USB drive at boot should be
quite doable, but you will want to make sure you have opk write the
installed files to /tmp or something like that.  Likewise, important
binaries and shared libraries installed to the ramdisk will probably need
to have symlinks pointing to their proper location under / .  (I think the
symlinks can just be stored on the internal root filesystem OK.  They'll
just dangle until opkg installs the necessary files on each boot.)

I'm including the .config file I've used for my TP-Link TL-MR3020 for
reference, although do please bear in mind this wasn't used for compiling
Commotion.  Likewise, my config files so far exclude all USB stuff.

On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 9:14 AM, Seamus Tuohy <s2e at opentechinstitute.org>wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> I worked on getting a Commotion image to work on the battery powered TP
> Links that we just got in and quickly discovered that they only have 4MB
> of memory available. Even when I removed nearly every package imaginable
> I still could not get the image to build.
>
> It looks as if there is no easy way to find out the size of a squashfs
> package so I will try to remove everything except basic functionality
> and usb support and then get everything back on by running it off of a
> mounted usb this week.
>
> Just an FYI.
>
> s2e
> _______________________________________________
> Commotion-dev mailing list
> Commotion-dev at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/commotion-dev
>



-- 
Ben West
http://gowasabi.net
ben at gowasabi.net
314-246-9434
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