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Brickable?Brickable?Posted Jun 30, 2008 13:55 UTC (Mon) by Tuxie (guest, #47191)Parent article: Netgear's open wireless-G router for open source hackers
What I'd like to see is a completely unbrickable router platform for Tomato/*WRT with descent performance. It is way too easy to brick routers when reflashing them. Reboot too fast after the flash - *poof*. Choose the wrong image - *poof*. Choose a version that happens to be incompatible with your particular revision of the hardware - *poof*. Select a bad combination of settings in the web interface - *poof*. Most of the times it's possible to "unbrick" by doing a series of "reset nvram" button presses, but too often even that isn't possible and you'll have to get special hardware and solder stuff on the motherboard to re-flash. What is needed is a router with a REAL "reset to factory defaults" button, that restores ALL flashable components and CMOS to a re-flashable state, nothing excluded.
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Brickable? Posted Jun 30, 2008 15:28 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] > What I'd like to see is a completely unbrickable router platform As long as you have jtag access to the board's chipset/flash then it shouldn't be a big deal at all. It's what I got to do at work when a programmer fubars a box. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JTAG If you want to play around with Linux or programming other types of embedded devices it's a life saver. The only downside is that some manufacturers only provide proprietary hardware and drivers for windows. This is what the DBoard is for OpenMoko http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973_Debug_Board_v3 So if you want something that is friendly for hackers look for easy access to jtag port, adapters, and documentation. (or equivalent) You may have to look up the actual parts on the board and go to the chipset's manufacturer's website and such to get everything you need, but this isn't a big deal. As long as you know which pins on the board are the jtag stuff. Or maybe you may end up with a situation like many BIOS boards were you have a removable chip that you'd need a special programmer for. Which is fine, as long as it's all documented and the hardware for doing that is affordable.
Brickable? Posted Jun 30, 2008 15:37 UTC (Mon) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] > What I'd like to see is a completely unbrickable router platform ... > What is needed is a router with a REAL "reset to factory defaults" > button, that restores ALL flashable components and CMOS to a re-flashable > state, nothing excluded. That means that you need about twice as much flash as you would otherwise have, which is unrealistic on cost grounds in most markets (though I do know of some more "professional" devices that work that way). What is possible, however, is to have a small bootloader that isn't easily overwritten. The NSLU2 has a version of RedBoot for this. When started up with a button held down in a particular way [so you need the $ for at least one button!] this bootloader listens on the network for instructions to write to the flash. Even if you write garbage, you can still repeat the process.
Brickable? Posted Jun 30, 2008 18:36 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] Whether or not you need twice as much flash depends on how capable the factory image is. If the factory image is just a bootloader, and pretty dang generic, you can do it with a small amount of ROM. In fact, the AT91SAM7 series does that whole thing on chip (it's got a USB bootloader in the chip's ROM, and if you assert the "erase" pin, it clears the flash and runs that bootloader). If the USB and that pin are accessible, you pretty much can't brick it except by damaging the chips. It doesn't really work if you want a locked-down device, since the bootloader won't enforce signed-image requirements, and it wouldn't work for users who want their hardware to route packets out of the box, but it'd be fine for this sort of device.
Brickable? Posted Jun 30, 2008 18:31 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] 9/10 you can reflash these things from the serial port - these things tend to have boot loaders capable of receiving new flash via TFTP (there's also JTAG, but that's a bit too extreme for most of us). What's needed is for the vendors to provide an interface to the serial port, e.g. by including a cheap TTL-serial <-> USB convertor...
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