Re: [Cerowrt-devel] tp-link 4300 evaluation

[David Lang <david@lang.hm>]

On Mon, 27 May 2013, Dave Taht wrote:

>>
>>  That's tragic. I just picked up a Netgear WNDR4300 (openbox on sale at the
>>> local Fry's) to see if I could hack up a CeroWrt clone on it. It seems to
>>> be mostly the same hardware as the WNDR3700v4 and the TP-Link WDR43[01]0,
>>> with things just wired up slightly differently.
>>>
>>
>> As I understnad it, the difference between the WNDR3700v4 and WNDR4300 is
>> that the 4300 has a slightly better wireless chip.
>>
>> Unfortunantly from what I've seen so far, they did something wierd with
>> the storage and as a result the stock openwrt can't access it. I've seen
>> reports of people getting it to run from an initramfs, but this means that
>> no settings can be preserved across reboot.
>>
>> If you've seen anything different, I'd be very interested to hear about it
>> (I picked up a 3700v4 and a couple 4300's for testing)
>>
>
> according to a birdie, "it looks like it's an ONFI with quirks, or nobody
> has realised that it's ONFI at all.". Perhaps that's enough clue to get
> someone started? but I fear jtag debugging will be needed. Flash chips tend
> to have interesting race conditions....

Given that we have the GPL source for the kernel available from Netgear, I'm a 
little puzzled that we are having to reverse engineer this instead of working 
from the source.

Even if the first version was little more than a cut-n-paste of the netgear 
butchered driver until people have time to analyse it fully.

David Lang