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Netgear's open wireless-G router for open source hackersNetgear's open wireless-G router for open source hackersPosted Jul 1, 2008 1:49 UTC (Tue) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804)In reply to: Netgear's open wireless-G router for open source hackers by katti Parent article: Netgear's open wireless-G router for open source hackers 16MB of flash? The OpenWRT Hardware page only lists 8MB. I bought a Linksys WRT350N last year which has 8MB flash, 32MB of RAM, 500MHz ARM9, 802.11n and a single USB port. Unforunately I ended up with a v2 which is only now having OpenWRT ported to it, the v1 had DD-WRT support at the time. The real question is why companies ship routers with so little flash - I can get a 16GB USB flash drive for $AU60, which is less than 4c/MB, so it's not like it'll break the bank. The same goes for RAM - modern Marvell SoCs use DDR, which is also at rock bottom prices.
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Netgear's open wireless-G router for open source hackers Posted Jul 1, 2008 2:39 UTC (Tue) by busterb (subscriber, #560) [Link] The flash memory on these devices generally hangs off a word-addressable local bus from the CPU, so it is relatively expensive NOR flash. The flash memory in your cheap USB drive is NAND flash, which is only block addressable, like a hard drive. Most CPUs require NOR flash to boot from because it looks like regular memory. It would likely be more expensive to include both NOR and NAND flash rather than just putting a little NOR flash down and calling it a day.
Netgear's open wireless-G router for open source hackers Posted Jul 7, 2008 16:16 UTC (Mon) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] You're generally right about NOR flash being needed to boot, but some vendors support copying NAND flash into RAM so it can be booted without needing NOR flash - see http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/2224021 for Samsung and Symbian collaborating to deliver this. You do need a smarter flash controller though.
Netgear's open wireless-G router for open source hackers Posted Jul 1, 2008 8:29 UTC (Tue) by katti (guest, #51840) [Link] You're right, my mistake. It's 8 MB flash, not 16. Anyway, I hooked up an old 256 MB USB thumbdrive to it, and with a little hack I use it as the root fs for Openwrt, giving me more than enough space for additional apps :)
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