WGR614L Firmware Upgrade Using Console and Bootloader

Nachi's picture
Submitted by Nachi on Mon, 03/03/2008 - 2:18pm

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 assuming the CFE bootloader's IP address is set 192.168.1.1 (the default).

1. Make sure you have PC connected (we will assume it is linux) to the LAN ports of the WGR614L and set ip address of the PC as 192.168.1.100 (or something else you prefer - make sure it different than that of the router and is in 192.168.1.0/24 subnet).

2. Power cycle the board and press ctrl-C at the time of load to get the CFE prompt.

3. At the CFE prompt type "tftpd" and the following message should be printed at the Console

CFE> tftpd

Start TFTP server

Reading::

4. On the PC start a tftp session to server 192.168.1.1 and send the required firmware file. You may use the following command on a linux shell

tftp -m binary 192.168.1.1 -c put wgr614v8_1_1_2_1_0_23_na.chk

5. On the console you should see the following

Loading...................................

Programming...

6. You should not power cycle the system before completion of flash programming to be completed and in some cases it may take about 5 minutes. After completion of flash writing you should see the following messages.

Wrire len/cksum offset @ 0x0038FFF8...done

7. After step 6 WGR614L should automatically reboot with the new firmware image.