My Contribution to LEDE (OpenWrt): A Hacktoberfest Adventure

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Hacktoberfest is a free-shirt-incentive-based-event for open source software contributions. It is quite simple - if you open four pull requests during October, you’ll get a free shirt. Since developers love swag, it’s pretty effective.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://amir.rachum.com/blog/2016/10/23/lede-hacktoberfest/
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Excellent post, and thanks for contributing toward LEDE! A couple questions, spurred by my recent post on the LEDE forum:

  1. Would you consider renaming your image to put “il” at the end? e.g,
    lede-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-factory-il.bin That would make it match the format of the -eu and -us versions, so all factory images would sort together on the download page.

  2. Is the lede-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-il-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin image different from the standard sysupgrade file (lede-ar71xx-generic-archer-c7-v2-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin)?

  • If the two sysupgrade images are the same, I would recommend that you suppress creation of the -il version, so that people can see that there may be several factory images (for different regions), but only one sysupgrade file.

  • If the -il version is different, I would ask you to consider adding it to the end of the filename, as above.

Thanks again.

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The Israeli version of the Archer C7 isn’t just the same device with a different region code. It doesn’t have the same region locking mechanism:

I had a quick look at the stock firmware images from the TP-Link IL website, and they don’t use the same region coding mechanism as the US/EU images. Instead of setting the region, they set the TPLINK_HWREV to 0x494c0001. To properly support the IL version, a separate Device/… definition should be added.

This means that as far as LEDE is concerned, this is a different device, as opposed to the US/EU versions. Look at the Makefile:

define Device/archer-c7-v2-il
    $(Device/tplink-16mlzma)
    DEVICE_TITLE := TP-LINK Archer C7 v2 IL
    DEVICE_PACKAGES := kmod-usb-core kmod-usb2 kmod-ledtrig-usbdev kmod-ath10k ath10k-firmware-qca988x
    BOARDNAME := ARCHER-C7-V2
    DEVICE_PROFILE := ARCHERC7
    TPLINK_HWID := 0xc7000002
    TPLINK_HWREV := 0x494c0001
endef

The “-il” here is part of the device name, not a file suffix. I don’t know how it’s possible to do what you ask. However, since I really only contributed that one PR, I’m definitely not a deciding factor here - I would ask around in the LEDE community about this.

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define Device/archer-c7-v2-il

Ahah! I agree that it should be treated as a different device. I have modified my answer in the forum. Thanks!