Supported hardware¶
Belkin RT-3200 / Linksys E8450¶
This device is based on a 64 bit Mediatek MT7622 ARM platform, and is “work in progress” in Liminix.
Note
The factory flash image contains ECC errors that make it incompatible with Liminix: you need to use the OpenWrt UBI Installer to rewrite the partition layout before you can flash Liminix onto it (or even use it with tftpboot, if you want the wireless to work).
Hardware summary¶
MediaTek MT7622BV (1350MHz)
128MB NAND flash
512MB RAM
b/g/n wireless using MediaTek MT7622BV (MT7615E driver)
a/n/ac/ax wireless using MediaTek MT7915E
Installation¶
Installation is currently a manual process (you need a serial conection and TFTP) following the instructions at ubimage
GL.iNet GL-AR750¶
Hardware summary¶
The GL-AR750 “Creta” travel router features:
QCA9531 @650Mhz SoC
dual band wireless: IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac
two 10/100Mbps LAN ports and one WAN
128MB DDR2 RAM
16MB NOR Flash
supported in OpenWrt by the “ath79” SoC family
The GL-AR750 has two distinct sets of wifi hardware. The 2.4GHz radio is part of the QCA9531 SoC, i.e. it’s on the same silicon as the CPU, the Ethernet, the USB etc. The device is connected to the host via AHB and it is supported in Linux using the ath9k driver. 5GHz wifi is provided by a QCA9887 PCIe (PCI embedded) WLAN chip, supported by the ath10k driver.
Installation¶
As with many GL.iNet devices, the stock vendor firmware is a fork of OpenWrt, meaning that the binary created by flashimage can be flashed using the vendor web UI or the U-Boot emergency “unbrick” routine.
For flashing from an existing Liminix system (we believe that) it is necessary to first boot into a system-outputs-kexecboot system, otherwise you’ll be overwriting flash partitions while they’re in use - and that might not end well.
Vendor web page: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar750/
OpenWrt web page: https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-ar750
GL.iNet GL-MT300A¶
The GL-MT300A is based on a MT7620 chipset.
For flashing from U-Boot, the firmware partition is from 0xbc050000 to 0xbcfd0000.
WiFi on this device is provided by the rt2800soc module. It expects firmware to be present in the “factory” MTD partition, so - assuming we want to use the wireless - we need to build MTD support into the kernel even if we’re using TFTP root.
Installation¶
The stock vendor firmware is a fork of OpenWrt, meaning that the binary created by flashimage can be flashed using the vendor web UI or the U-Boot emergency “unbrick” routine.
For flashing from an existing Liminix system (we think) it is necessary to first boot into a system-outputs-kexecboot system, otherwise you’ll be overwriting flash partitions while they’re in use - and that might not end well.
Vendor web page: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt300a/
OpenWrt web page: https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-mt300a
GL.iNet GL-MT300N-v2¶
The GL-MT300N-v2 “Mango” is is very similar to the :ref:`MT300A <GL.iNet GL-MT300A>, but is based on the MT7628 chipset instead of MT7620. It’s also marginally cheaper and comes in a yellow case not a blue one. Be sure your device is v2 not v1, which is a different animal and has only half as much RAM.
Installation¶
The stock vendor firmware is a fork of OpenWrt, meaning that the binary created by flashimage can be flashed using the vendor web UI or the U-Boot emergency “unbrick” routine.
For flashing from an existing Liminix system (we think) it is necessary to first boot into a system-outputs-kexecboot system, otherwise you’ll be overwriting flash partitions while they’re in use - and that might not end well.
Vendor web page: https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt300n-v2/
OpenWrt web page: https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-mt300n_v2
QEMU MIPS¶
This target produces an image for QEMU, the “generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer”.
MIPS QEMU emulates a “Malta” board, which was an ATX form factor evaluation board made by MIPS Technologies, but mostly in Liminix we use paravirtualized devices (Virtio) instead of emulating hardware.
Building an image for QEMU results in a result/ directory
containing run.sh vmlinux, and rootfs files. To invoke
the emulator, run run.sh.
The configuration includes two emulated “hardware” ethernet
devices and the kernel mac80211_hwsim module to
provide an emulated wlan device. To read more about how
to connect to this network, refer to Networking
in the Development manual.
QEMU Aarch64¶
This target produces an image for the QEMU “virt” platform using a 64 bit CPU type.
ARM targets differ from MIPS in that the kernel format expected by QEMU is an “Image” (raw binary file) rather than an ELF file, but this is taken care of by run.sh. Check the documentation for the QEMU (MIPS) target for more information.
QEMU ARM v7¶
This target produces an image for the QEMU “virt” platform using a 32 bit CPU type.
ARM targets differ from MIPS in that the kernel format expected by QEMU is an “Image” (raw binary file) rather than an ELF file, but this is taken care of by run.sh. Check the documentation for the QEMU (MIPS) target for more information.
