Following the introductory post on “OpenWrt Firmware Wizard” project for GSoC 2019, there have been a number of progress updates.
I have been working with Paul Spooren and Moritz Warning on the project for the past couple of months.
Progress Till Now
Achievements so far can be summarized as below:
- Appropriate modifications to the build system have been made to produce JSON for each targets and a consolidated one to be read later by the firmware selector.
- Metadata was stored in the buildsystem’s makefiles. Modifications to the data stored has been carried out. The DEVICE_TITLE variable was split into at most three variables namely DEVICE_VENDOR, DEVICE_MODEL and DEVIDE_VARIANT. In addition to this, DEVICE_RAM and DEVICE_FLASH has been added. We received positive response on the first from the community while the second modification is still under review.
A sample output of this will look like this:
“
I wrote a script to split the DEVICE_TITLE into the required fields which could be found here. It uses Paul’s https://github.com/aparcar/openwrt-devices for DEVICE_RAM and DEVICE_FLASH. - I built a basic version of the firmware-selector for PoC and the source code for the same could be found here. It looks like this:
Next Steps
Through the next phase of the program, the following is to be achieved:
- Though almost everything is done regarding the Makefile metadata, but accuracy of the data has to be reviewed. Also, the addition of DEVICE_RAM and DEVICE_FLASH is still under review and is subject to change.
- Take community feedback and improve upon the firmware wizard. Functionality to build custom images will be added. A server backend has to be created for the generation of images and serving the same.
- Start working on the auto upgrade feature for OpenWrt.