Development Setup

[Dmitry Kireev]

Hi, I'm enjoying asuswrt merlin a lot. Appreciate your effort, this is a great OSS product.

I was wondering, if anyone already made some progress on building merlin environment in qemu?
Currently I'm struggling with finding original asus kernel binary, binscan via trx doesn't seem to contain it, just sqhashfs.

running mipsel emulator is easy, I just need a kernel and boot from squashfs. It is working like this currently:

#qemu-system-mipsel -M malta -kernel vmlinux-2.6.32-5-4kc-malta -hda debian_squeeze_mipsel_standard.qcow2 -append "root=/dev/sda1 console=tty0"


Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you.

 

[L&LD]

Sorry, I don't have an answer to your questions, but curious what an OSS product is?

 

[Dmitry Kireev]

Sorry, I don't have an answer to your questions, but curious what an OSS product is?

Open Source Software

 

[L&LD]

Thanks.

Although I don't think AsusWRT is truly OSS.

 

[lancethepants]

@L&LD
There are portions of the project that are closed source, the wireless driver for instance. Other than the omission of wireless functionality, I think the rest would leave you a fully functioning opensource router. There are other portions of AsusWRT that are closed source (ie, Aicloud, smartqos etc) , but aren't required for for the router to function.

"Opensource" is a pretty broad term, which ultimately to me means you have access to the source code. Now whether the software is considered "free" according to GNU's/stallman's definition of the term is another matter. This is one area where tomato unfortunately falls short, because the UI is under a more restrictive non-gnu compatible license. You still have the source code, but your are restricted on what you are allowed to do with it.

@Dmitry Kireev
What exactly is it you're wanting to do? Run the router software in emulation?
If that's the case, unfortunately it isn't nearly as easy as one would think. Many embedded systems like routers depend on having physical access to the onboard chips for access to nvram. Router firmware heavily depends on nvram variables and will not function without it.

This blog is very informative regarding how embedded systems work.
http://shadow-file.blogspot.com/


The author uses a library called "nvram-faker" that allows him to emulate individual binaries on a PC. Now whether you could use this to help emulate the whole firmware, I don't know. Last I remember reading too, nvram-faker had only the ability to read nvram variables (from a text file), but the functionality to write nvram variables had not been implemented.
https://github.com/zcutlip/nvram-faker

Ignore this post if it's not relevant to what you're trying to achieve, or be more specific about what you want to do.