How I assembled my dd-wrt mod for ASUS RT-N13U
I'll start with the background. I got into the hands of this ASUS RT-N13U device for inexpensively this miracle and immediately there was a desire to use it to the fullest, but unfortunately my native firmware left much to be desired and I went to look for alternatives on the Internet and came across dd-wrt. Everything in it was good, only swap and file systems it did not support for my router.
I waited a long time for a miracle, but alas I did not wait and decided to make my firmware based on the original one. I read the wiki on the site dd-wrt and got to work.
The dd-wrt developers, as it turned out, provided a completely ready development environment , but only for 64-bit systems, which could not but be frustrating, since My plan was not to install another operating system. Therefore, I downloaded buildroot 2011.2 and decided to build the firmware using the configuration files provided by the dd-wrt developers, with certain changes of course. After a couple of hours of struggle, rootfs wasn’t collected and failed; a bunch of source codes needed for compilation for some reason didn’t get into svn dd-wrt.
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I did not want to give up, and I decided to disassemble the original firmware, add the necessary modules to it by compiling the kernel, and finally collect my own firmware mod. To quickly parse the firmware, I used the Firmware Modification Kit . Everything went well, except that the size of the flash memory of the router was not dimensionless and had to sacrifice such functionality as IPv6, USB printing, USB serial and 3G drivers. It was possible to remove, of course, the support of public access points services that no one needed at home, but there it was necessary to spend a lot of time trying to cut it all out “beautifully”.
As a result, I assembled a kernel with swap support and modules necessary for the operation of external drives and enjoyed life. The only minus that remained in my firmware is that it can only be flashed via tftp or using an Asusov utility to restore the router, which in fact is also a tftp client, but for narrow usage.
At the end of the article I want to give a list of utilized additional to standard utilities, etc. in chronological order:
1. Buildroot 2011.2 (in the settings before assembly, select Target Architecture and Target Architecture Variant for your hardware)
2. Original dd-wrt firmware (optional version)
3. Firmware Modification Kit
4. Linux Kernel source codes (the version must match the version inside the original firmware)
5. Kernel configuration file taken from dv-wrt svn server for the desired router here
6. lzma 4.32
7. mksquashfs-lzma 3.0
8. mkimage
Warning: carefully select the buildroot architecture and kernel configuration! An error can lead the router to the state of “brick” after the firmware, which is treated only through the internal uart or, even worse, through the programmer!
In conclusion, I want to say that sometimes it’s not worth waiting for something, you can do it yourself. Discussion of my mod on the dd-wrt forum and the firmware itself can be found here .
If you have questions, ask in the comments - I will answer with pleasure. Also, I assembled all the necessary actions to build the firmware into a script, if someone needs to write, I will definitely share it.
I waited a long time for a miracle, but alas I did not wait and decided to make my firmware based on the original one. I read the wiki on the site dd-wrt and got to work.
The dd-wrt developers, as it turned out, provided a completely ready development environment , but only for 64-bit systems, which could not but be frustrating, since My plan was not to install another operating system. Therefore, I downloaded buildroot 2011.2 and decided to build the firmware using the configuration files provided by the dd-wrt developers, with certain changes of course. After a couple of hours of struggle, rootfs wasn’t collected and failed; a bunch of source codes needed for compilation for some reason didn’t get into svn dd-wrt.
')
I did not want to give up, and I decided to disassemble the original firmware, add the necessary modules to it by compiling the kernel, and finally collect my own firmware mod. To quickly parse the firmware, I used the Firmware Modification Kit . Everything went well, except that the size of the flash memory of the router was not dimensionless and had to sacrifice such functionality as IPv6, USB printing, USB serial and 3G drivers. It was possible to remove, of course, the support of public access points services that no one needed at home, but there it was necessary to spend a lot of time trying to cut it all out “beautifully”.
As a result, I assembled a kernel with swap support and modules necessary for the operation of external drives and enjoyed life. The only minus that remained in my firmware is that it can only be flashed via tftp or using an Asusov utility to restore the router, which in fact is also a tftp client, but for narrow usage.
At the end of the article I want to give a list of utilized additional to standard utilities, etc. in chronological order:
1. Buildroot 2011.2 (in the settings before assembly, select Target Architecture and Target Architecture Variant for your hardware)
2. Original dd-wrt firmware (optional version)
3. Firmware Modification Kit
4. Linux Kernel source codes (the version must match the version inside the original firmware)
5. Kernel configuration file taken from dv-wrt svn server for the desired router here
6. lzma 4.32
7. mksquashfs-lzma 3.0
8. mkimage
Warning: carefully select the buildroot architecture and kernel configuration! An error can lead the router to the state of “brick” after the firmware, which is treated only through the internal uart or, even worse, through the programmer!
In conclusion, I want to say that sometimes it’s not worth waiting for something, you can do it yourself. Discussion of my mod on the dd-wrt forum and the firmware itself can be found here .
If you have questions, ask in the comments - I will answer with pleasure. Also, I assembled all the necessary actions to build the firmware into a script, if someone needs to write, I will definitely share it.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/139592/
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