[BPI-R3] Settings not saved

[dangowrt (Daniel Golle)]

Openwrt uses an overlay filesystem which is normally only in ram and gets lost on reboot. If you want parts of it it needs some space outside the overlay and configured on mount to use this as storage.

That’s not true. OpenWrt uses overlayfs usually backed by a filesystem in a persistent storage volume on the device used for booting. This doesn’t need to be configured in any way and happens by default.

Only in case of that filesystem not being available, tmpfs is used for overlay. Ie. when something is broken you still get to a shell somehow, but it’s not a good setup for production, obviously.

Nor (and maybe nand) are not that large to carry a full os and userdata. These spi-devices are for rescue purposes only…

I guess that about 95% of all devices supported by OpenWrt come with rather small SPI-NOR or SPI-NAND flash chips. Linux and rootfs easily fits in less than 10 MiB, still leaving a few MiB for user data and configuration to the user even on just 16 MiB SPI-NOR.

128 MiB of SPI-NAND is really huge for a router firmware, you end up with > 80 MiB of free space even with excessive amount of pre-installed software. Ok, if you are a device vendor and want to ship translations for 26 different human languages for UI, all possible USB drivers, … out of the box, then SPI-NAND is a good choice.

IMHO eMMC is really only needed for multimedia OS (hence the name…) or when using the device as a server to host complex container or VM images to provide additional services provided only in this format (but in that case it’s probably advisable to add NVMe SSD).

Of course, when using a general purpose OS like Debian, that’s a different story. It comes with all documentation and even development tools on-disk and hence needs lots more space…

[dangowrt (Daniel Golle)]

You don’t need to build OpenWrt from source if you are not planning to modify low-level sources. Just use the OpenWrt Firmware Selector which also allows you to customize the generated firmware image (click on Customize installed packages), e.g. adding luci-ssl will generate an image with pre-installed Web-UI.

[dangowrt (Daniel Golle)]

Restore Boot loader, recovery, production image to them (NAND, EMMC) on boot menu (need UART connection).

It is also possible to do this without UART connected, see this post.

[jtxnn678]

lol yeah correct, but how I wish we all are expert like you dangowrt. without UART its like a blind man driving a car for me, in case something went wrong I don’t know which direction to go. I am still scratching my head with Xiaomi AX3200.

[j90s5520 (jason)]

hi I also encounter the same problem in here https://forum.banana-pi.org/t/banana-pi-bpi-r3-openwrt-image/13236/50

hi every morning i have one question when i set openwrt and click save & apply button then use openwrt luci`s reboot it is recovery to not set openwrt how can i fix this bug? or operational problems?

problem persists

[frank-w]

Please try openwrt from openwrt.org,not bpi image

[j90s5520 (jason)]

OK I will try be later~ thx

[j90s5520 (jason)]

i use openwrt firmware and it can success save my set, but new i receive other question. when i ues web-ui and change luci set just like server name , and i click save/apply can see countdown timer , when countdown timer in 85 and web say save [The configuration changes have been applied.] and now i poweroff and poweron, wait to ui and check my change and i find The configuration changes haven`t been applied.but if i ues web-ui system reboot onece than poweroff and poweron The configuration changes have been applied,so how can i check this question or fix it?

[alk (Alexey)]

Same problem while using SD or EMMC. With NAND its OK, settings is saving successfully.

In bootlog is presented that:

[    2.602669] eeFlashId(0xffff) isn't match with 0x7986!
[    2.602671] Flash content is empty, so use AX6000 configuration by default!

Update

Installed to eMMC image from OpenWRT site.

Now all OK with settings saving, but R3 doesn’t works with 160MHz 5G channel and I have only 87.2MB overlay to store applications…

[frank-w]

for resizing partition daniel posts some instructions and warnings because this may break sysupgrade if root-partition is larger or equal in size of ram

[BPI-R3] Change or add partion to /overlay

Preservation is configurable and many package automatically add files to be preserved, it’s not just /etc/config… What do you mean by “manual”? Any kind of sysupgrade (which is also the only way to update the Linux kernel and modules) always wipes rootfs_data. Expecting that users will backup their data (or whatever it is they want to store there) onto some external media before performing sysupgrade is more complicated than asking them to installing uvol and autopart which allows to easily m…

Cannot resize my root partition on BPI R3

On the R3 the /dev/mmcblk0p66 device is automatically mapped as the remaining space on /dev/mmcblk0p5 after parsing the uImage.FIT for kernel, device tree and read-only squashfs rootfs (squashfs filesystem is mapped as /dev/mmcblk0p65). So those p65 and p66 partitions are not actual GPT partitions but rather p65 is the filesystem sub-image of the uImage.FIT stored in p5 and p66 is the remaining space on p5 after the uImage.FIT. Hence you only need to edit the size of /dev/mmcblk0p5, then reboot…

for 5G-channel: it depends on regioncode is there is any free 160MHz-channel as this maps different channels together and afair i have seen a patch which allows only 80Mhz channelwidth.