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@NoTengoBattery NoTengoBattery released this 30 Sep 23:51
· 896 commits to linksys-ea6350v3-mastertrack since this release
v2.01
8fe03cd

EA6350v3/XX8300/Convexa Custom ROM v2.01

Based on OpenWrt commit cba4120
If you want to apply the patches, first checkout the above commit and git-apply
the patches accordingly. After that, you can build, update and modify your copy.

NOTE: The download link is at the very bottom of this text. Please: read all
the notes and then continue to download. This page is designed to force you to
do that.

Don't forget to apply the hotfixes!

Since I'm not perfect, some times I do forget some details when the image is
ready and it's not worth to re-build. Instead of just keeping the annoyances go
along, I decided to implement the "hotfixes" mechanics.

Here is how it works:

  1. Flash your image as always.
  2. Once your device boots, go immediately to the Backup / Flash Firmware in
    LuCI.
  3. Upload the hotfixes.tar.gz in the Restore section, as if it's a backup.
  4. That's all!

A better feedback solution!

I've implemented the ramoops feature. If you find your device crashing or
becoming inestable, please:

  1. Go to the settings in LuCI and enable the debug levels for the logs
    1.1. Verify that the size is 1536 and the file is /dev/pmsg0. Change it
    accordingly.
  2. Wait the device to crash or to become inestable.
  3. If the device crashes, go to the point 5.
  4. If it doesn't crash, reboot as soon as you can. Try to not force reboot, if
    you can, by unplugging since it will clear the data from RAM and with it, the
    logs.
  5. Check the /sys/fs/pstore folder, and if it's not empty, collect a copy of
    these files.
  6. Along with the files from point 5, if any, collect a copy of the directory
    tree inside /rom/bootfs/pstore, which are the collected logs over time.
  7. Send these files to my e-mail. Don't expect an answer by email and instead
    open a GitHub issue. If you don't have a GitHub account, explain it in your
    email and I will open the issue and document the problem for you.
  8. Over time, your boot partition may become full. Please cleanup your the logs
    from /rom/bootfs/pstore if you are short in space. You can disable the
    automatic collection of logs by deleting /etc/hotplug.d/ntp/00-pstore, but
    PSTORE itself is a kernel feature that cannot be disabled, unless you build
    your own kernel. All logs will be removed automatically after a system
    upgrade.

Discussion about this work, feature requests and questions in my OpenWrt
thread. Bug reports in the GitHub Issues page.

How to install

Warning: the 'sysupgrade' procedure will reset some settings to their default
values. You can see the changes made to your system by looking at the 'bootz'
files in /etc/bootz.

First, decompress the downloaded file. This file is compressed using zstd and
it's a tarball.

  • If you are using Windows, you can install PeaZip
  • If you are using macOS, you can install Keka (beta)
  • If you are using Linux, you probably have all the tools already installed

You will find a folder once decompressed. Inside this folder, you will find the
following folders:

  • bin: this contains the two "flasheable" versions of the firmware. One is a
    sysupgrade image that you will use to update from another version or from
    OpenWrt; and the other is a factory image which you will use to flash
    directly from the Linksys firmware.
  • info: this folder contains the manifests, the configuration seed and the
    checksums. Also, it contains a copy of this document.
  • patches: it contains all the patches that apply cleanly over the fork
    point. Use them if you download the source code and want to build your own
    firmware form a working copy. Also, they need to be distributed due to the
    software licence.

From the OpenWrt firmware or from another version of this firmware

Go to LuCI and apply the sysupgrade image. Either from the OpenWrt firmware or
from another version of this firmware. This firmware will not apply cleanly
over the stock OpenWrt firmware.

Note: You should perform the upgrade without keeping/saving your settings,
otherwise, your device will likely soft-brick. If it does brick, you will need
to trigger a recovery as documented in the qiki. This happens because this
build contains patches to make the switch work, but they will stop the device
from running with the OpenWrt's default configuration and viceversa.

Go to http://192.168.50.1/cgi-bin/luci/admin/system/flash if you are using
another version of this firmware. Go to https://192.168.1.1/cgi-bin/luci/admin/system/flash
if you are using the OpenWrt firmware. Or you can use the command line if you
have not installed LuCI. Then, apply the update accordingly.

From the Linksys EA6350v3/XX8300 firmware

From the OpenWrt web page for the device:

  • Attach to a LAN port on the router
  • Connect to the Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Page (default 192.168.1.1) and login
  • Select the "Connectivity" tab on the left
  • Find the option for manual upgrade on the panel
  • Select browse, and browse to the factory binary image
  • Click update
  • Read and accept the warning
  • The router LED will start blinking. Wait for the device to boot up
  • When the router LED goes in a slow blinking, you can now navigate to
    http://192.168.50.1 to your new OpenWrt installation

Reverting back to OEM in one click

WARNING: this method only works if you installed the provided factory image
directly from the Linksys firmware. If you have already "sysupgraded", this
method will not work.

If you have not installed another update of this firmware or OpenWrt, you can go
to: http://192.168.50.1/cgi-bin/luci/admin/system/advanced_reboot

Then, you can click the "Reboot to alternative partition..." to revert back to
the OEM firmware. Wait for the device to reboot and load te Linksys firmware.

If you have installed either OpenWrt or this firmware twice or more, refer to
the OpenWrt forum for reverting back to stock (EA6350v3 only): wiki

Features and packages

The binary installable image contains the following packages and features:

  • testcalibration script for easily and safely testing calibration board files
    if your wireless performance is not optimal (EA6350v3 only).
  • BackToStock script for easily and safely reverting back from the OpenWrt
    firmware to the Linksys stock firmware. Refer to the documentation in the
    wiki here (EA6350v3 only).
  • extroot
    • using the OEM partition as /overlay for added storage to install packages
      and for extending the firmware ROM lifespan (EA6350v3/XX8300 only).
  • DNS
    • Disabled dnsmasq DNS forwarder in favour of unbound resolver with TLS
    • Configured Unbound as a TLS forwarder for a secure DNS server (currently:
      Quad9)
    • Note that Quad9 already implements DNSSEC, you don't need to configure your
      slow CPU to do it again.
  • Utilities
    • kernel features: taskstats (for atop/htop)
    • hardware: blkid, lsblk
    • tools: bash, nano, nologin, sudo
    • performance: haveged, schedutil, compressed-memory
  • LuCI
    • uhttpd-openssl
    • apps
      • advanced-reboot, compressed-memory, uhttpd, unbound
  • File Systems
    • exfat, ext4, f2fs, msdos (FAT16/32), ntfs
  • Kernel features and modules
    • USB Support
    • USB Attached SCSI and USB Mass Storage
    • New Linux IOSCHEDs evelators and Governors
      • Governor: schedutil enabled by default for all CPU's
      • IOSCHED: kyber by default for non rotational disks
      • IOSCHED: bfq by default for rotational disks
      • IOSCHED: noop by default for single-queue devices
    • Fully preemptive @ 100 Hz kernel for more responsiveness
  • Minimum CPU frequency set to 512 MHz instead of 48 MHz
  • Enabled and unlocked all operation points to allow the CPU frequency scaling
    governor schedutil to take better decisions
  • Changed clock latency from 256000ns to 100000ns (which is the value used by
    Qualcomm)
  • Patched VLAN to work as expected for all supported IPQ40xx targets
  • Patched SQUASHFS to avoid crashes due to spurious SPI errors

General notes

All kernel modules for a particular version, among with a wide set of LuCI apps,
are automatically uploaded to GitHub and opkg is configured to use them. All
of the other software is available from OpenWrt's snapshots, but the ROM is not
configured to use them [by default].

If there is some missing package or kernel module, please open a GitHub issue or
send feedback to my e-mail explaining exactly what's missing. It will be added
to the next release.

Memory subsystem

The device has only 256/512 MB of RAM. That's plenty but sometimes it might get
a little short (i.e. when indexing a huge library with ReadyMedia). For this,
the memory subsystem has been tuned to support almost any NAS or adblocker load:

  • The system will use the swap cache when possible. It's a pool of the 30.00% of
    the system memory (when used alone), compressed using lzo-rle, which is one
    of the fastest compressors available. The system will eventually evict pages
    to a real swapping device (which also includes zram) when it can't compress
    them, when they are too old or when the pool is getting depleted.
  • When zram comes online with the lzo-rle compressor (the default unless you
    change it in LuCI, when usig zswap it will use zstd instead), it will
    adjust the zswap pool, so both pools (torgether) will use the user's
    requested space; and then the system will set this space for swapping. zram
    has a slower but yet more powerful compressor.
  • If the backing file/device is setup correctly, pages that are hard to
    compress, or that are too old in the zram pool will be eventually evicted to
    the storage, freeing the memory and lowering the compressor overhead, in a
    process called "compaction".

What's the gain?

There are several use cases for this:

  1. If the system is using only zswap, then great I/O operations will be
    avoided, making the system work faster at the cost of a portion of the memory.
    zswap will evict the never-used pages to the slow, real device over time,
    reducing the footprint by keeping only the actually needed in memory.
  2. If the system is using only zram, then all of the I/O is avoided. The
    zram compressor is not as fast as zswap, but can guarantee good savings,
    because it can compress better as it's a block device and not a LRU cache.
  3. If the system is using both, pages that the kernel needs constantly will land
    in zswap which is really fast and offers decent savings. Older and not so
    easy to compress pages will be evicted to zram, where they may be compressed
    better at the cost of more time required to do so. This way, users can benefit
    from the fast zswap and from the good zram at the same time.
    4.1. When using a real swap device, zram will be filled first and only when
    the system cannot write more pages to it, it will begin to use the real
    swap. The benefit: avoiding swapping at all costs. The bad side: older and
    never-used pages will remain in memory, they cannot be sent to the swap
    device.
    4.2. In order to alleviate problems in 4.1, zram can evict pages to a
    "backing storage" device, so when using the "triple layer" (zswap -> zram
    -> device), the system can use the memory more efficiently than the
    default configuration.

By using compressed memory, the kernel will delay the memory starvation. This is
because most of the memory loaded by programs is only used once, most of the
time. If the kernel cannot reproduce the memory, for example, anonymous memory,
it's forced to keep it, either in RAM or in swap.

Notes for this release

This is a full custom configuration optimized for the devices. The purpose of
this build is to give the user a sensible selection of software for testing and
using OpenWrt without too much effort. It's also optimized for lower latency and
fixes many annoyances.

This build contains some important changes compared to OpenWrt. It contains some
customizations that cannot be found in the official OpenWrt image or the OpenWrt
repositories, making both kind of incompatible. Specially because it contains
several kernel patches.

Please: perform a factory reset if you are replacing OpenWrt with this and
viceversa or else your device will soft brick, and you'll see yourself doing a
recovery.

Take into consideration

For saving space, install the OpenSSL version of the software if another SSL
version is available. This is because OpenSSL and libopenssl are already
installed (and compressed in the firmware image, therefore saving space).

LuCI has full OpenSSL support. However, for your convenience, you can access the
HTTP version of LuCI. This is because it's not convenient to install a random
self-signed certificate every single time. You can use the HTTP version, restore
your certificate and then disable the HTTP access.

Be careful if you are using a public IPv4 or IPv6. Try to keep the access to
your device as tidy as possible, for your security. It is totally safe to use
HTTP in your LAN (if you trust your clients) but do not expose it to WAN, you
will be leaking your root password that way.

The default IP address is now 192.168.50.1 and IPv6 is fd00:192:168:50::1.
Hostname is Civic, Convexa-B, Convexa-S or Dallas.

For LuCI Administration WebUI, go to

Wireless password:
 - 2.4GHz WRT -> OpenWrt 2.4GHz
 - 5.1GHz WRT -> OpenWrt 5.1GHz
Login password:
 - admin -> admin
 - root -> root

Dowloads

Click the "Assets" button below and download the .tar.zst file. If you want to
check the hotfixes integrity, here is the SHA256 checksum. Use the shasum
command or PeaZip/7zip, if you use Windows.

hotfixes.tar.gz: SHA256 [currently, no hotfixes are needed]
Assets 3
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