And the kernel 2.4 did not work better for the switch part (however the wifi card has been detected). Looks likes the stock bcm57xx driver do not work with this chip...

I'm going to take a look at linksys sources...

Hello, first post ever. :-)
I've bought WRT610N and found out that it wasn't supported yet as I expected since it's a brand new device.
Can you guys try to estimate the time it takes to fully support this router in OpenWRT? I don't want any specific date, of course, just a rough estimate - weeks, months...

Unfortunately, as I'm not a programmer and have no knowledge of this stuff, the only way I can help is by sending some donation.
If anyone is interested, let me know... ;-)

PS: I really appreciate your work, thank you

I bought 2 WRTSL54GS and mailed one to Kaloz to speed along that port.
If you want to buy an extra one, and send it to someone on the dev team
I feel certain that would be welcome.

Donations page here:
http://wiki.openwrt.org/Donations

(Last edited by vincentfox on 15 Nov 2008, 19:50)

Thank you for the reply and the link.
As much as I would love to send an extra unit, unfortunately I can't afford to buy it now, I'm a little short on cash ATM.
It costs at least 220$ here and that's a bit too much for me.

However, if anyone else was willing to buy this particular model and send it over to moderators, I would definitely cooperate with them to raise the money needed...

I received my WRT610n tonight.

Immediately pulled it apart.  You need a Torx #10 bit, and a thin blade of some sort to help crack the case.

The JTAG connectors are a MICRO format header which is way smaller than used on old WRT54G models.

FIRST MISSION: SERIAL CONSOLE!

I *HATE* soldering onto pads, at best I am a determined amateur who usually doesn't destroy things.
My methods would probably make an expert cringe.  I got serial installed though.

Step #1: Use solder-wick to suck up lacquer coating on pads
Step #2: Tin the ends of wire
Step #3: Push wire into position.
Step #4: Push down on wire with soldering pencil for 1-2 seconds
Repeat for other 2 wires

My wiring:

WRT-pin2(TX)----red-----plug-pin2(RX)
WRT-pin3(RX)----white---plug-pin1(TX)
WRT-pin5(GND)---black---plug-pin3(gnd)

Be careful with resulting wires it is easy to pull loose again. I left a generous bend and made sure to have enough wire
that there was no stress on the connections.  I drilled a hole to left of the USB port on back using my Swiss "Champ" knife
which has an auger type blade which is great for cutting new holes in belts or in WRT soft plastic.  There is a capacitor nearby
which I almost touch because I didn't check for clearance first. If you duplicate this work drill the hole a bit further from the
USB port than I did.

Hooked it up using my usual USB-serial cable and it works great. I poked around a little in Linksys root shell.
Looks to be kernel 2.4.20 and Linksys firmware 1.00.00 B18 as shipped.

See photos below:

(Last edited by vincentfox on 19 Nov 2008, 09:53)

Hi all,

Here are some news on my progress: after a certain number of hours and quite a lot of flash time, I finally managed to get the network card recognized under 2.6. I've still not managed to get it working totally but already seen the broadcast traffic on my local network. I'll try later tonight as my LAN setup may be the problem (ie: gigabit switch with dot1q vlans).

Basically, you need to patch tg3.h to add the PHY id, and also ssb_gige.h (include/linux/ssb/) to correct a little error referencing CONFIG_BCM947xx instead of CONFIG_BCM47xx.

Will try to post more later...

Finally, some success reward all these hours without sleep ;-)

Okay - I'm delivering one of these right now as it seems very propable that openwrt will be ported on it and it's closest to wrt-350n that ain't no longer available (and people who owned it and would had been willing to sell one, have already abandoned their routers) as I get benefits that I was needing with this:
- faster cpu that one in wrt54gs
- usb (I rather use usb instead of soldering parts on pcb)
- kernel 2.6

Unfortunately, I don't know if I can help a lot, as my skills on system level programming are more or less; none
And I also am not very much willing to brick my device either as I wasn't interested in soldering (so no serial or jtag for me)..

But anyway, if there comes time when a stress test or draft-n test or something similar seems to be required, I might be able to give it a go..

This router for now doesn't come to production environment, not until january - so I can do some tests if I later on can re-flash stock firmware on it - or openwrt will be functional enough so I can use it in "production environment".. I just decided that I'd better buy it before it also goes to EOL like wrt350n..

(Last edited by jake1981 on 19 Nov 2008, 15:20)

I hope to get wired Ethernet support quite soon, however I'm far from optimistic for the wireless card: it is an infamous bcm4322, not currently supported by any OSS drivers, with a proprietary driver delivered by broadcom, but I guess it's not working on MIPS, and even if it was working, it requires to disable ssb which is required for tg3 to recognize the switch... Chicken and egg...

Wireless support is totally dependant on the b43 team that is actually busy reverse-engineering the Broadcom drivers but with no "visible" results until now. The only thing we could do is a donation

After all, I had to postpone ordering one with 2 weeks due to my financial situation, just cannot afford one immediately And as I am not likely going to be raised or something like that in years, it's very unlikely that atleast I could afford to donate one

I know, it would be better if we coud use b43 driver instead - but how I see it, currently other products using wireless by broadcom are using proprietary drivers, why couldn't we keep using one 'till b43 team can provide us a decent driver? I didn't quite understand what you said by "it's not working on MIPS, and even it was, it would require us to disable ssb which just happens to be required for tg3 to recognize the switch.."

By a proprietary driver; do you mean a driver used on, for e.g. Linksys wrt54gs's and other older products? Why not use one from WRT610n? One used on different models most likely after all wouldn't work - wrt610n has dual radios and a/b/g/n connectivity.. There's gotta to be a source where earlier proprietary driver was from after all.. And as b43 team says: BCM 4322 802.11a/b/g/n (Has PCI-ID 0x432B) - This device has an N Phy. There is no support for any Draft 802.11n features.
Therefore it's very unlikely that driver would be available any time soon (maybe in 2 years, and that propably ain't enough time even if they would get donations) as they are still working on previous versions of hardware and have got so less results in eyes of a normal user in years, that I guess maybe there's a proper driver for wrt54gs after 2 years and maybe then we can start expecting some results on draft-N nics.. Just trying to be realistic here..

Judas Priest that DD-WRT thread exploring the WRT610n is long!  I admire their serious & quite expert efforts but most of it seems to be going to waste as with all things DD-WRT it ends up depending on if BrainSlayer takes an interest in it.  It's a bit mysterious to me that later in the thread they refer to the place I soldered on my serial port lines as a "second location" which implies there is a first location I find as yet no description of.

I'll try to cull through it and extract the useful bits into the Wiki page, probably take a week.  GPIO info, pin descriptions, etc.

JTAG doable if I can find the right headers at Fry's or someplace.  First time I've seen a board with JTAG for the WiFi cards.  OEM is CyberTan so might be some CyberTan sources of information on this unit also.  More research in order.

Jake 1981, yeah if you want something TODAY this is not your best bet.  In my house right now I am still using a WRT54GS v1.0 as router (OpenWRT 8.09RC1) and an old WAP55AG with Linksys firmware for 802.11a traffic.  Old hardware works just fine I'm not really personally highly motivated for latest & greatest Ultra-Turbo performance I just want my household to run smooth & solid.  Older hardware running newer OS just fine for that.  I like to compare notes with other people with their Uber-Products and ask "yeah how many times a week you have to reboot it?" cause my WRT54G-class stuff may not be loaded with buzzword features but it "just works" and I can't recall the last time I've had to reboot a Kamikaze router.

Looking further out I think this WRT610n is a kick-ass little piece of hardware and fun to experiment on.  If only Broadcom weren't such buttheads about their drivers.

(Last edited by vincentfox on 19 Nov 2008, 19:45)

yeah, I also have 5 wrt54gs's (2x v1.0 and 3x v4.0) in my house - but old systems slow down network performance, I cannot stream video from another room to another with dvb quality properly with wlan - and file transwer on wired feels sometimes too slow too.. and 2.4 kernel just lacks some really nice fw modules available for 2.6
My routers also run with 8.09, minimized versions..  and one of v4 devices runs with 2.6 that has a working wireless AP (although, not very stable, but still - atleast as far as I remember, haven't been using wireless of that AP in ages..)..

Jake1981, have you considered adding 802.11a to that mix?  A co-worker GAVE me this "old" WAP55AG for free and new there's a nice HP unit of course.   Just an idea.

I find 802.11a to be a bit faster and most importantly less interference.  All my WiFi clients use 5-gig I only keep the 2.4-gig turned on in the WRT54GS because I have one device (Samsung Q1 Ultra) that has stubbornly defied my efforts to get it to accept an a/b/g card.

I'll see in january if I make some changes - I should have been relocated myself before february..

Oh man this is funny.

I'm looking through the 1.00.00 B18 source code, and once again find the name "Barry" in comments all over the place.  Same thing way back in the WRTSL54GS source code.

I have to find out who this guy is.

Donation was just a proposal, open source is not behaving like churches even if it may sometimes look like a religion

I'll also try to give some money to b43 devs, but also not in the range of the price of the router, but if many of us are contributing, telling them we want 4322 support, it may help. Who said one guy should pay for all others ?

I'll try to explain, at least what I understood... Corrections and contributions are welcome.

- About MIPS: the CPU running in embedded systems like this router are generally not intel x86 derivative. There many options on the market, and many (if not most) are built around the MIPS architecture. The problem is that these two types of CPUs do not use the same "language" (not the same assembler), so a program that you compile to run on a standard PC won't work on a MIPS CPU. If you have the source code, you can adapt it to support multiple architecture, and compile it for both architectures ( this will produce one binary per type of CPU). You certainly already understood, that if you don't have source code, you're out of luck.

- Broadcom has released a proprietary (ie: closed source), but only for x86 and x86_64 (no MIPS release). In order to protect their "intellectual property" (ie:owning the inventions created by other's brains), they hide most of the information and knowledge about their chips into some source code they will never distribute except perhaps to their direct clients (ie: linksys, asus, dlink, netgear....). These guys then build their final product and ship only the binary to public. Public can then use the driver but only for the specific uses intended by the manufacturers. Lets add one point of honesty: another reason for hiding code is compliance (have a look at http://linuxwireless.org/en/developers/Regulatory). Lets add one point of speculation: it's far more in the interest of routers manufacturers to lock the source code. I guess that the guys in these companies just get mad when they see the amount of features you can put on these boxes with openwrt. They can't sell boxes providing all these features at the price we get them, or they would have a hard time justifying the prices of their "enterprises" boxes, so they protect their advance by using secrecy...even if more than 90% of the software used in their boxes is open source. This is why everyone will correctly point out that they suck!

- SSB is an inter-chip communication bus (like PCI) that, IIRC, has specifically been developed by Broadcom. New drivers for managing this bus have been added to Linux 2.6, and both the tg3 driver for the ethernet card, and the b43 drivers are developed to use that ssb driver. However, the documentation shipped with broadcom's driver specifically exclude the activation of ssb in kernel, so we could not use tg3 and this driver at the same time (even there is a way to run the binary on MIPS, which IMHO is itself near to impossible)

Well, linksys are based on 2.4 kernels. The only "short term" solution seems to integrate the proprietary wlan drivers and the proprietary ethernet driver (as it looks from the latest firmware at least). As I don't care for wlan at the moment, I'm more willing to go for 2.6 for all the functionality it provides.

There is a source for recent or old proprietary drivers... The problem is that we don't and won't have access to it ;-)

Well, these guys are reverse-engineering the beast and that's a hard, long and uncertain process... So you're right, until someone open up the specs (don't hope), the process will certainly be long, and I would not for a full working release of openwrt on this platform anytime soon...

(Last edited by sentenza on 19 Nov 2008, 22:50)

Did you also notice that bcm57xx and et (new?) drivers are shipped as binary in this release (sources are in 350n release)??? I'm quite sure they don't want this nice gbit switch running in openwrt to quickly...

I wonder if we may hit a gpl violation on the bcm57xx, however I don't know is someone external from broadcom ever contributed to this driver...

If you find the guy, I'd also like to contribute to get some specifications ;-)

Gang,

Sold SRS, DXD, QID today have a bucket of Monopoly money.  My other hobby right now is
shorting the heck out of what Uh-mericans laughably consider a financial system.

Anyhow I'm flush today, emailing dev-team to see which one would accept WRT610n
in the mail in exchange for some action on this project.

(Last edited by vincentfox on 19 Nov 2008, 21:14)

Actually, I checked the donations list and noticed that money also is handy donation so I also decided to donate a small amount of money. First impression of donating to such group was that they might accept a device as a donation Ofcourse, that might speed up things a bit, or atleast; give a good start But yeah, I'll donate in december a small amount - after all - they've done pretty good work and are not so far from publishing something that can be used.. They indeed have a long todo list, but it has been huge when they have started their project, so..

---

Okay, yes - I do understand that different architechtures cannot execute code compiled for other arch - I have a mis-understanding here, as a proprietary driver I thought you ment driver that ships as pre-compiled binary in firmware sources provided by Linksys. I just downloaded firmware sources and can verify that wrt610n is using 2.4 kernel after all I got this wrong impression from wiki page about wrt610n as there it states that system is running with 2.6 branch, but now when I look it more specific - I noticed that hostname is openwrt and it's more likely that these output copies are not from original system. So now I realize that as long as we want to use 2.6 branch, only option is to skip wireless part until b43 team provides us support (and linux wireless team makes changes to other parts of system so b43's driver could work properly).

Actually this finding is a good thing for me and also that is good that I wasn't able yet to afford this router as this new information makes it vital for me to think about it again.. Do I want fast wireless with 2.6 (then I need to look for other routers) or more powerful hardware on 2.6 without wireless - or do I compromise and stick to 2.4..

Well - maybe it's a good thing to consider this again, by being patient, time will pass and there's always a possibility that prices go lower (very unlikely, but you always can hope..)

(Last edited by jake1981 on 19 Nov 2008, 22:47)

Looks like it, smells like it...

Sorry, but this means nothing to me . Any hint?

I'll be happy to join... Can provide some time and remote access to the box...

Stocks.  It's not important, just that I hit the jackpot in the casino now
I have some "free money" to play with I am going to kick in a little for dev
work on this platform.

(Last edited by vincentfox on 19 Nov 2008, 23:46)

Since I already stated that I would participate in donating to developers, I'd like to show my appreciation for your generosity by sending at least some money to you.
So my question is: would you accept a small "gift" from someone who also thinks that one guy shouldn't pay for all the others? ;-)

(Last edited by Zillator on 20 Nov 2008, 17:46)

Zillator,

Don't worry about it.  If anyone can though, please donate to the B43 project guys.  We need open-source Broadcom drivers and they need the support.

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43/donations

(Last edited by vincentfox on 20 Nov 2008, 17:56)

20 Euros donated... thanks for the information and link

Okay - I just bought one wrt610n and now I am totally broke until next friday

I just made some initial tests on it with stock firmware.. Stock firmware wasn't newest, but when using web interface, it hanged from time to time when trying to save information. I wanted to try to see some stats from it using old trick in webif, entering something like "192.168.1.1; dmesg" into ping address window, but it doesn't work anymore, there's most propably some kind of a regexp that is used to detect proper ip addresses and URLs..

Hi Sentenza et al.

I'm having real trouble compiling OWRT. My Puppy Linx distro doesn't have a port of svn, Cygwin doesn't have a case sensitive filesystem, my SuSE server has a dead cd drive so can't load svn etc. <sigh>

Would Sentenza be kind enough to post a binary for a wrt610n some place handy?

My wrt610n exploits are linked from the page http://www.glasson.org