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mwgapHacking
This page contains information about the MWGAP AP from Minitar. This device was developed by Minitar as a replacement for the MNWAPB and resulted form a consultative process Minitar performed with users on their forums.
OpenWRT port
The goal is to port OpenWrt to this device. I'll document the process on this page and include links to any files that are created along the way. At some stage I'll build a master patch and set things up to pull in the appropriate bits as needed.The steps are:
- Select the correct build options
- Build mips big-endian tool chain with non-mips patent free patch
- Building the kernel
Select correct build options
The target device does not have a configuration in the build environment. We need to add one and select the correct target and target options befre we can build either the toolchain or the firmware itself.- Add the following to trunk/target/Config.in at line 191, just before the endif
config LINUX_2_4_RTL8186 bool "Realtek RTL8186 2.4" select LINUX_2_4 depends BROKEN select mips select BIG_ENDIAN select USES_JFFS2 help Build firmware for Realtek RTL8186 based boards ( eg Minitar MWGAP )
- Add the following line to trunk/include/
- Select the configuration options to build the right platform
make menuconfig, select Advanced configuration options for developers, select Toolchain options, select gcc version 3.4.6-nonmips back up to advanced options, select show broken platforms back to top level, select the target system you added ( Realtek RTL8186 2.4 ) save your config
Patent free toolchain
This step looks surprisingly simple. I was going to apply the patches we used for the Minitar MNWAPB development from
here, but after looking into the toolchain build there is already a option to build gcc 3.4.6 with a patent-free patch applied. The patch is different ( not sure of the origin ) but addresses the same instructions that the Lexra core does not support. Getting it to build needed a couple of hacks:
- the download of gcc will fail so cd dl and copy gcc-3.4.6.tar.bz2 to gcc-3.4.6-nonmips.tar.bz2 ( a hard link may also be OK )
- When the tar is unpacked it will by default unpack into gcc-3.4.6 and the patches will fail to apply. In the trunk/toolchain/gcc/Makefile find the place where the compiler is unpacked ( line 115ish )and add this line:
mv $(PKG_BUILD_DIR)/../gcc-3.4.6/* $(PKG_BUILD_DIR)
Building the kernel
Building against the 2.4.32 kernel needs an updated .config and a number of patches.- create a dir trunk/target/linux/rtl8186 & trunk/target/linux/rtl8186/patches
- cd into linux/mtl8186 and copy the makefile from ../brcm/Makefile to .
- get patched config
- cd mwgap/patches and wget the kernel patches
- create a dir trunk/target/image/rtl8186
- cd into image/rtl8186 and cp ../brcm/Makefile and the dir lmza-load ( there's an alternative loader as well - more later )
The Minitar firmware builds a kernel with an embedded ramdisk. This is a problem in some ways and good in others. It's a problem in that you can't change the rootfs without having to rebuild the kernel but good in that once the kernel loads it has also loaded the rootfs into RAM. This was great for testing builds a you could tftp an image to the device and then jump to it to run it - no need to touch the flash at all. This allowed you to borrow a device for a short while to test on it.
Minitar firmware
Bootloader
Version 2 (current) modified Mon, 26 Jul 2021 12:49:29 +0000 by dna0xff
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