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11 Comments on “Installing FreeBSD on TP-Link TL-WR1043ND”

1. 
   1 edt said at 7:07 pm on July 1st, 2013:

   I enjoyed reading about your FreeBSD experience and look forward to more updates! Your work reminds me of a project which I have to finish… which is modding a Seagate Dockstar as a home network firewall but this newer hardware looks pretty nice I must admit!

   -Eddie

2. 
   2 hirenp said at 9:22 pm on July 1st, 2013:

   I am glad you find it enjoyable!

   Segate Dockstar also looks pretty slick and promising. Specially 1.2GHz processor. Not enough ram though.

3. 
   3 Cam Ell said at 4:14 am on July 30th, 2013:

   Hi, Thank you for your blog I have enjoyed reading about your experience. I have a question if you don’t mind. On my attempt to do a build using the scripts you mention I got an error message “kernel image is too big” at the very end. What did you have to do to reduce the kernel build size?
   Thanks!

4. 
   4 hirenp said at 4:59 am on July 30th, 2013:

   Yeah, kernel has grown just a bit too big in last few months. You can turn off things you do not want in the kernel config file ($src/sys/mips/conf/TP-WN1043ND). Or try building with a couple months old -current source tree. Hope this helps. Let me know if you need more info.

5. 
   5 Cam Ell said at 8:28 pm on August 12th, 2013:

   Hi, thank you for your reply. I’ve just returned from traveling abroad and will try out your suggestions.

6. 
   6 Cam Ell said at 9:09 pm on August 14th, 2013:

   Hi,

   I have tried to add the line “options NO_GAMES= true # do not build games (games/ subdir)” to $src/sys/mips/conf/TP-WN1043ND but kernelbuild fails with message “unknown option “NO_GAMES””. Could you give me an example of an entry you made in TP-WN104ND that resulted in excluding something from the kernelbuild process. Thank you again.

7. 
   7 hirenp said at 10:15 pm on August 14th, 2013:

   Hi Cam.

   I will hopefully have some more time at my hand to sit down and look at this. I am currently running about 4 months old kernel which fits just fine. As I said, kernel got a bit too big in last few months. If you want, you can checkout a bit older source tree and build the kernel out of that.

   Also, games are not part of kernel so what you are doing is not going to help.

   To determine how kernel is being build, you need to look at kernel config file for this router: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/mips/conf/TP-WN1043ND?revision=239625&view=co And if you see on the top it is including AR91XX_BASE : http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/mips/conf/AR91XX_BASE?revision=253845&view=co

   These files are already trimmed down to only needed things as it is. But to reduce more, you may want to disable debug options or something like that. As I said, I still haven’t gotten time to figure it out and test it.

   Do not hesitate to ask questions if/when you get stuck.

8. 
   8 Cam Ell said at 5:02 am on August 16th, 2013:

   Hi,

   Thank for your assistance! So far I have gotten these results:

   Building a kernel with all debugging references disabled in files: (AR91XX_BASE and TP-WN1043ND).

   I first (as previously) used “svn checkout svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/head src” and resulted in this:

   [email protected]:/tftpboot # ls -l
   total 30048
   -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5701481 Aug 15 14:31 kernel.TP-WN1043ND
   -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 18612343 Aug 15 14:31 kernel.TP-WN1043ND.symbols
   -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 6116352 Aug 15 14:32 mfsroot-tl-wr1043nd.img.uzip
   [email protected]:/tftpboot #

   Next I deleted everything in /src and used “svn checkout svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/stable/9/ src” and resutled in this message:

   Populating `/root/work/freebsd/head/src/../mfsroot-tl-wr1043nd.img’
   Image `/root/work/freebsd/head/src/../mfsroot-tl-wr1043nd.img’ complete
   *** Running mkuzip to create a compressed filesystem ..
   *** Target Done.
   *** Target : tplink
   4388+2 records in
   4388+1 records out
   2247039 bytes transferred in 2.756113 secs (815293 bytes/sec)
   [mktplinkfw] *** error: kernel image is too big
   [email protected]:/root/work/freebsd/head/src #

   The build result was this:

   [email protected]:/tftpboot # ls -l
   total 17344
   -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 11953552 Aug 15 21:01 kernel.TP-WN1043ND
   -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5713408 Aug 15 21:01 mfsroot-tl-wr1043nd.img.uzip
   [email protected]:/tftpboot #

   I am not sure why but the new build with the older code seems to be larger? Is there a step I have missed?

   Best regards

9. 
   9 hirenp said at 3:24 am on August 20th, 2013:

   Hi Cam,

   Size depends on whats in the tree at that point in time.

   For now, please use the image I’ve generated in may end:
   http://www.strugglingcoder.info/pkgs/TP-WN1043ND.factory.bin

   I am trying to look into how to shrink kernel and mfsroot.

10. 
    10 Cam Ell said at 5:45 pm on August 22nd, 2013:

    Thank you! I will try it using your image. Hopefully later, I can work out how to make my own image by reducing the kernel size. Could you tell me what release you used to build your image? From what I have discovered it looks like the “/build/build/bin/build_freebsd” script is what needs to be edited. I have been trying various combinations but have not been able to get the image size below 11M. Here is what I have tried (so far):

    …
    # Create a make.conf

    echo “#MALLOC_PRODUCTION=” > ${X_DESTDIR}/../make.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    # Make a src.conf

    echo ‘WITHOUT_KERBEROS=”YES”‘ > ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_KERBEROS_SUPPORT=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_NIS=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_NDIS=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_IPX=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_ATM=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_ICONV=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_CLANG_IS_CC=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_BLUETOOTH=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_EXAMPLES=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_MAN=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_RESCUE=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_SENDMAIL=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_ACPI=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_INET6=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_PAM=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_PF=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

    echo ‘WITHOUT_IPFILTER=”YES”‘ >> ${X_DESTDIR}/../src.conf.${BUILDNAME}

11. 
    11 hirenp said at 6:28 am on September 16th, 2013:

    Sorry for delayed response. We are still trying to finalize diffs for reducing the kernel and rootfs size but for now you can use http://www.strugglingcoder.info/patches/shrink_TP-WN1043ND_temp.txt – And that should generate smaller kernel.