[Ewrt-devel] Re: why not just packages for OpenWRT

Thu May 6 05:51:47 PDT 2004

Irving Popovetsky wrote:

>On Wed, 2004-05-05 at 11:01, Tommy B wrote:
>  
>
...

>>The point is when you reflash the binaries, all your other 
>>configurations stay. Also, the NVRAM remain virtually untouched, so 
>>there's no compatibility issues with the Linksys binary only drivers.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>I don't understand.  This is the case with our code too.   all
>configuration changes are stored in NVRAM.  When the system boots, rc
>generates configuration files (like passwd and nocat.conf) based on
>variables in nvram.   When you hit the reset button, a function in
>defaults.c is called which resets all of the nvram variables to the
>values defined there.
>
>  
>
Let's try another way

/ # cat /proc/mtd
dev:    size   erasesize  name
mtd0: 00040000 00010000 "pmon"
mtd1: 003b0000 00010000 "linux"
mtd2: 0010948c 00010000 "rootfs"
mtd3: 00010000 00002000 "nvram"
mtd4: 00200000 00010000 "OpenWrt"
/ #
Notice the size ? nvram is only 64K and is used by the Linksys fw. 
Openwrt doesn't add/remove any nvram items. Thus when Linksys does it's 
no problem.  Conflicts aside, the OpenWrt partition is 32X the size of 
the nvram partition -- and that's not counting compression.

>The advantage that I can see with JFFS is that you can update individual
>binaries without reflashing the system.  But in my opinion this will
>  
>
OpenWRT uses the ipkg system.  User packages are added and removed simply.

>  
>
Regards,  Tom

[g2]  on #wrt54g