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

[Josh King]

I'm reluctant to incorporate an http server into the daemon directly; 
seems to be adding a lot of complexity for not much benefit. I'm not 
sure what you mean by uhttpd bindings, if by that you mean some 
mechanism that will further reduce the size. I am currently working on 
ubus bindings, through which the daemon could potentially communicate 
with uhttpd.

On Wed 27 Feb 2013 01:46:39 PM EST, Ben West wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>
>

--
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

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