MyOpenRouter - Under the Hood

WGR614L Firmware Upgrade Using Console and Bootloader

Nachi — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:18:35 GMT

As a developer what saves my board and day most of the time is the serial console and boot-loaders’ ability to download/upload firmware. Even when the something goes badly wrong with the firmware you just compiled - you can use the boot loader to get back to a running firmware and try to debug your under development firmwares. WGR614L open source router uses the CFE boot loader and amazingly the boot loader is powerful enough (and yet small enough) to be extremely useful for most of the developers. Here I will go through the basic steps that I use for upgrading firmware using the serial console. Although CFE bootloader provides many options to burn a firmware image into the flash, we will only discuss the tftpd command. Basic CFE command for firmware upgrade is flash and tftpd is nothing more than an alias to the flash command and some options. that starts a tftp server and waits for a remote tftp client to send the firmware to it and once the firmware is received, after doing the checksum validations the firmware is loaded into the flash. Let us quickly go through the steps for using this tftpd command. I am...

WGR614L Firmware Image Creation

Nachi — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:02:55 GMT

Some of you have already noticed that WGR614L firmware uses a .chk extension. Let us go through the steps that is needed to create a firmware image in .chk format. Most of the broadcom hardware uses a TRX style fimware. Netgear's WGR614L linux based open source router's .chk is also based on the same TRX format - but does add the following interesting improvements First, the kernel is compressed using LZMA which achieves a better compression than the usual gzip or bzip2 compression. This improvement does need an addition to the CFE bootloader to support uncompression of LZMA encoded kernel Second, this formats adds a header to trx format, that has the checksum, length, and a compatible board identifier. These checksum and length information makes the job ensuring image integrity much easier and since these checksums are stored in the flash and also checked at each system boot, boot-loader can also identify if the flashed image gets corrupted. So to pack a image in the .chk format you will need the following files at hand Thee files are generated when you compile the downloaded linux opensource codes for WGR614L Download the source code the Netgear WGR614L Linux Kernel - vmlunx...

WGR614L - Router for developers

Nachi — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 11:17:48 GMT

Happy New Year! A new router platform WGR614L is coming soon and what got me excited is that this new platform is well suited for many excellent community developed firmwares like like OpenWRT , Sveasoft , DD-WRT , Tomato . This Broadcom 5354 SoC based router has 4MB flash and 16MB SDRAM - good enough to run most of these popular firmwares. In fact most of the firmwares that runs on Linksys WRT54GL should be easily (relatively speaking) portable to WGR614L. Both the platforms uses the processor from Broadcom as well as the linux kernel source code is fairly similar. Netgear WGR614L’s BCM5354 is a newer generation SoC from Broadcom that has a 20% faster CPU and larger data and instruction caches than its predecessor BCM5352 used in Linksys WRT54GL. WGR614L also implements WPS and WPA2 standards to make it compatible with Windows Vista. But you will possibly miss these features when you install a third party firmware like Tomato. Let us have quick look at how this new router stands up against the present Netgear’s open source KWGR614 router. WGR614L KWGR614 CPU 240-MHz MIPS32® CPU core with 16-KB instruction cache, 16-KB data cache, and 1-KB pre-fetch cache LX5280 32-bit...

Inside KWGR614

Nachi — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 06:00:40 GMT

KWGR614 is powered by the same RTL8651B processor used in the high performance Netgear Rangemax WPNT834 Access Point. Besides the RTL86151B SoC at 200 MHz, KWGR614 also sports the RTL8185L/RTL8225 WiFi chipset supporting WPA2-PSK and a generous 4 MB Flash/16MB of SDRAM enough to run many additional applications. SoC RTL8651B is an " Advanced Home Gateway Controller " from Realtek. The SoC is targeted towards high performance home gateways and wireless routers. A highly capable and integrated multi-layer switch provides significant performance advantages for common NAT and Firewall tasks. The switch also provides L2/L3/L4 switching acceleration for traffic to/from the external wireless chipsets connected via the PCI bus. The RTL8650B/RTL8651B integrates the following key components and technologies: 6-port layer 2/3/4 switch MAC, 5 Fast Ethernet transceivers, and an MII interface Hardware Access Control List (ACL) for firewall applications A Lexra Lx5280 32-bit RISC CPU with a 4K I-Cache, a 4K D-Cache, an 8K I-MEM, and a 4K D-MEM A powerful protocol engine to support auto L3/L4 checksum check and re-generation, auto VLAN tagging, and auto PPPoE encapsulation Rich set of peripherals for value-added services: two UART ports, a USB 1.1 host controller, a PCM interface, and 22 GPIOs WiFi RTL8185L...