On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 10:53:33AM +0200, Adam Hamsik wrote:
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> Hello folks
> 
> I have chosen my  school project,  I will write step by step guide  
> howto install netbsd on linksys router. But I have some questions.

Hi Adam,

One of my Google Summer of Code students in 2006, Ada Lim, began porting
to the Asus WL-500G, which must resemble your Linksys WRT54.  I have
the sources, and I will be happy to share them with you.  As I recall,
Ada did not get her Asus router to boot to single-user, and lots has
changed in -current since Ada began her port.

Carefully weigh the costs with the benefits of developing for this
particular platform: the Broadcom chips are poorly documented,
and developing without proper documentation is oftentimes risky and
frustrating.  The capabilities of the Linksys router are rather low:
to the best of my knowledge, nobody runs a useful NetBSD router in 4 MB
Flash and 16 MB RAM; shrinking NetBSD to fit on such a router would be
a major contribution in and of itself.  Also, the availability of the
WRT54GL is not assured.

Producing a driver for the Broadcom wireless may be a lot of pain for
very little gain, depending how you get your kicks :-).  I believe it
deserves to be a separate project.

Let me suggest a few embedded projects that I believe are less risky and
more widely applicable.

        * develop a driver for the NAND Flash storage on the RouterBOARD
          1xx series, www.RouterBOARD.com.  Demo writing a bootable
          NetBSD image to the Flash.  Demo running NetBSD from the flash
          (read-only).

          (RouterBOARD is an open-architecture board with MiniPCI slots
          for wireless cards, et cetera.  The cheapest boards in the
          1xx series have no CompactFlash slot.)

        * shrink NetBSD kernel+userland to fit an affordable router
          where NetBSD already runs, such as the Meraki Mini (~6MB usable
          Flash, 32MB RAM), demonstrating a useful IPv4/IPv6 wireless
          router.  I suggest starting with the NetBSD-based CUWiN "mesh"
          router software, but I am biased. :-)

        * for embedded web apps, create a C-language implementation of
          Template Attribute Language for interpolating values from a
          C program into XHTML webpage templates

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung@ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933 ext 24