[Commotion-discuss] Some pre-experimentation mesh hardware inquiries

[Ben West]

This is exactly the approach Open Mesh has taken with their proprietary NG
firmware, i.e. a closed-source daemon to do all the mesh/dashboard
housekeeping stuff.  The NG images hardly weigh in at 2MB now.

I've taken several stabs at trying to prune down previous iterations of
Commotion (i.e. pre DR1) to 4MB, while retaining the luci web UI, by having
the luci sources compressed or pre-compiled, by removing IPv6 support, and
by lots of other little snips and cuts to extraneous packages, but so far
no luck.

Both luci and openssl support seem to guarantee the images will be larger
than 4MB.  If you are to the point of writing a daemon in C, it may also
become worthwhile to either incorporate a very basic HTTP server into that
daemon (which is what coovachilli does) or incorporate bindings to uhttpd.
Probably the latter could be done with reasonable effort.

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 12:04 PM, Josh King <jking at chambana.net> wrote:

> Yes, and even the Fonera 2100 still has 8MB of flash. The image would
> actually have to pruned down to something significantly less than 4MB
> in order to accomodate the JFFS2 partition in additon to the squashfs
> one. So we're actually looking at something closer to 2-3MB. We'll see
> how small we can get it, and having so much more of it as C binaries
> should hopefully make it more compact, but my feeling is that it will
> probably turn out that 4MB of flash is just too small to be able to
> support. Anyway, we'll see how it turns out once we have AA-based
> testing images.
>
> On Wed 27 Feb 2013 12:44:20 PM EST, Ben West wrote:
> > I don't have any current versions of the 'minimal' ath5k-based Commotion
> > images, besides those listed below:
> >
> >
> http://info.gowasabi.net/commotion-openwrt/openwrt/bin/atheros-ar2315-minimal/
> > Circa OpenWRT r31693, from Summer last year
> >
> >
> http://info.gowasabi.net/commotion-openwrt-new/openwrt/bin/atheros-ar2315-minimal/
> > Like above, but with a newer kernel and compat-wireless library
> backported
> >
> > All of these imageshould have the root pwd pre-set to r0ot56c0MM0t10N .
> >
> > The only image I tested successfully were the older of the two version
> > listed above, on a FONera 2100.  Still, I have posted the config file I
> > used to build both versions, so that you can try building your own.
> >
> >
> http://info.gowasabi.net/commotion-openwrt/openwrt/atheros-ar2315.minimal.config
> >
> http://info.gowasabi.net/commotion-openwrt-new/openwrt/atheros-ar2315.minimal.config
> >
> > Please note the ath5k (aka atheros) images will not run on a WRT54G
> > (brcm47xx-based) or on the TP-Link (ath9k-based).
> >
> > It should be straightforward (although tedious) to prune down the current
> > package set for DR1 Commotion to get a ~4MB sized image in squashfs.
> > Although, you would likely have to axe potentially useful features, e.g.
> > IPV6 support or Luci web UI.
> >
> > Also, do be mindful of the RAM limitation for older devices like a
> WRT54G,
> > which has only 16MB of memory.  The recent incorporation of the zram
> > package into OpenWRT trunk may allow operation on such RAM-bound devices,
> > but to date I have *not* been able to run the v3.x kernel reliably on
> these
> > units.  And the OpenWRT dev team also doesn't expect it to,
> unfortunately.
> >
> > On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 10:40 AM, Chris Ritzo <chris.ritzo at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> This post in the commotion-dev archives has info about minimal images
> that
> >> Ben West compiled. This might be useful for the TP Link routers or
> others
> >> with lower system resources.
> >>
> >>
> https://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/commotion-dev/2013-January/001001.html
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Commotion-discuss mailing list
> > Commotion-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/commotion-discuss
>
> --
> Josh King
>
> "I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal,
> but because there is no such thing as a final goal." -Rudolf Rocker
>
>


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