Build 15315 k2.6 no longer supports BCM4704/4710 CPU's

[redhawk0]

With Eko's help I was able to determine that 15314 builds worked...but the 15315 builds bricks the Asus WL-500W unit....there are also some reports in the forum of bricked Asus 500gp units.

Eko was not able to determine the cause just by viewing the Serial output after the unit was bricked.

This unit has a 4704 processor, 8M Flash, 32M RAM...if it helps.

redhawk

Update: Please re-implement support for BCM4704 and 4710 CPU's in k2.6 builds.

[redhawk0]

Sorry...this is K26-NEWD2 builds...the V24 works fine.....as I am sure you can figure out from the svn that broke it.

redhawk

[anthonws]

Although my router did not bricked, I can confirm that using svn15337-r2 I could not connect/use or obtain response from it.

Was able to restore an earlier version, svn15280 if I'm not mistaken.

Anthonws

[redhawk0]

According to Eko there is no longer support included with the new Kernel introduced in svn 15315.

4704 processors are no longer supported.

The solution is to run only V24 builds on any unit with a 4704 processor from this point forward.

redhawk

[BrainSlayer]

ahm. not exact. right now its not supported since i'm upgrading the kernel sources for preparing to use a newer driver. but that doesnt mean that i will not work on getting the support back.

[redhawk0]

Ah...ok...Eko told me the kernel was totally missing the 4710 and 4704 code.

Glad to hear you're still considering getting the new K26 working again for the 500W.

redhawk

[phuzi0n]

Reopening until it gets fixed.

[BrainSlayer]

just to clarify. this is no bug. the k26 builds are initially made for supporting newer devices. but broadcom does not support older devices in newer codebase. so if we get older devices working, its nice but no requirement since the old 2.4 builds are still running with the same featureset. we will work on that as sidetask but no guarantee if we can support these devices forever since the wireless drivers are different too. so use the standard broadcom build on these devices

[phuzi0n]

The reason I think this should stay open is to re-implement support for BCM4704 and possibly BCM4710 in the kernel. BCM4704 isn't very old and is used in many N spec models. The WNDR3300 is a very popular router that is BCM4704 based and many people like to run k2.6 builds on it for better performance.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not but we have had k2.6 builds running on a variety of old routers by replacing the CFE's for nearly a year now. LOM discovered that the reason most devices brick with k2.6 is because the CFE doesn't give enough room for the kernel to load and so by using a CFE that does give enough room the k2.6 builds load up fine. I have k2.6 running on a wrt54gs v2.0 that has a wireless corerev=7 for example. ie. a lot of old devices actually are supported by 'NEWD2'.

There are differences between k2.4 and k2.6 builds. One that comes to mind is that k2.4 builds have a 4k connection limit since it has to be set before compiling but on k2.6 you can change it with a /proc setting. k2.6 builds also seem to give better throughput.

Maybe the new driver won't support old radios but maybe it will. Without the CPU support in the kernel we won't be able to even try.

[AndreyPopov]

4k limit not main because I use nvram set ip_conntrack_max to set new limit.

[LOM]

Now 17 month later there are even more Broadcom SOC's based on their 74K cpu core and the platform support drivers are getting bigger for each new SOC or plain cpu. It is not realistic to combine the drivers.