Just finished compiling my first ever OpenWRT image using @woziwrt 's GitHub repo with quite a lot of customization and it built fast and with no errors!!
Stuck at work so I haven’t tried booting it just yet, but I’m really excited to try it out later today.
This got me wondering, what other feeds, patches, etc would be useful to include? Im using the 4GB version of the BPI-R4 with the BE14 WiFi 7 module, and a MT7915E module in the top M.2 slot. My build did include the MTK feeds already, and the tx_power patch.
But what are some other useful feeds to include? Are there additional patches for the R4 to help make it even better?
What about getting any of the R4 and BE14 hardware acceleration working? How would I go about including more of the proprietary MTK / Sinovoip pieces to get more of the features functional? Im not going for pure open source, or small. Im going for performance, features and stability.
What about using the MTK feeds and patches for OpenWRT to compile a different Linux OS, such as Alpine or Debian? @frankw , seems to be “the guy” for OS’es other than OpenWRT. Is any of this possible?
Now that I understand the build process a little bit better, I want to explore other options and see what I can really do! Problem is, I have no idea what feeds are good, bad, sketchy, not needed, not compatible, etc. Nor do I know what patches are out there, which are beneficial or even still relevant.
That’s actually pretty cool, I didn’t know the Linux Kernel was “modular” like that. Would that essentially just be keeping the /boot partition and then just change the root to a different distro?
Or are there only specific directories and files I should copy over to the other distro from OpenWRT? Because I’d still love to get Alpine running smoothly on this thing.
I actually had a question about that, last week I was using your latest Debian Bookworm image and noticed it has the same regression with the MT7915e driver as pretty much every other Linux distro right now. Is there any fix for this that you’re aware of? Other than using an older Linux kernel.
Im specifically referring to the issue that prevents the 6GHz band on both the MT7916E and the MT7915E from working.
On a side note, I still cant figure out how to install your uBoot to the eMMC lol. I ended up creating boot and root on my NVME drive, and copying the files over from the .img file. But then just modified the boot loader on the SD card to tell it to boot from the NVME instead and left the R4 switched to boot from the SD Card. Hacky, but it worked. I have no idea why Im having such a hard time grasping how to set that up on the eMMC.
I use mostly mainline kernel (only with some patches to support r4 and some more) for my images. If i know which patches exactly fixes the issue i can add them to my repo. I thought i added some (detecting 0 in eeprom and skip these to use driver defaults),but maybe not in 6.12 (last LTS).
Basicly linux is the linux kernel and userspace can be replaced (some others did with armbian,gentoo,archlinux). But some created own building scripts like @ericwoud.
Emmc has to be installed from nand. Easiest way is to flash the sdcard image to user-part and replace fip there and flash bl2 to boot0. Then partconf needs to be set if not already done.
Basicly it is same like R3. But as flashing the adcard im from uboot is tricky (because of compression) i had booted nand and loaded linux kernel with initrd to flash this.
You can find initrd file on my gdrive
BPI-R3> run useusb
BPI-R3> setenv initrd rootfs.cpio.zst
BPI-R3> setenv fit bpi-r3.itb
BPI-R3> run newboot
I have no idea why Im having such a hard time grasping how to set that up on the eMMC.