"Voxel" R7800 Firmware

This is based openwrt, but by now it's a really old version. Netgear releases their versions for their routers, and they're still updating it. But Netgear's newest release has tons of old packages, bugs, and various "things" (AWS IoT, funsjq, ...) that are better left out. So Voxel's massively updated and fixed up Netgear firmware.

Except Voxel's source release, which is what this is forked from, doesn't build with out a bunch of work.

This source repo has stuff to make building it work. It should be pretty much the same firmware other than that.

Except Voxel hasn't released the full source to his binary builds, e.g. no toolchain directory, and the source released isn't always totally up to date, so it might be a slightly different than the binary.

Getting NSS & Wifi Firmware

To build this you need the firmware for the Atheros Wifi and the Qualcomm NSS network offload engine, which is not anywhere on the Internet. Qualcomm wants to make their hardware as hard to use as possible and won't distribute the firmware or allow anyone else to do it either.

So you've got to extract it from an existing R7800 image (Netgear or Voxel, same stuff).

I've written a handy script to do it. Run scripts/r7800-nss-fw.py on a existing R7800 firmware img file and it will extract the NSS and Wifi files, detect the NSS version, and create "source" tarballs. Example:

[~/R7800]$ scripts/r7800-nss-fw.py R7800-V1.0.2.93SF.img
Image header detected, fw for R7800 version V1.0.2.93SF
…
…
Creating archive NSS.AK.1.0.c8-00015.tar.bz2
…
Creating archive qca-wifi-fw-QCA9984_hw_1-CNSS.BL.3.0.2-00068-S-1.59256.1.tar.bz2

Success!
Place NSS.AK.1.0.c8-00015.tar.bz2 and qca-wifi-fw-QCA9984_hw_1-CNSS.BL.3.0.2-00068-S-1.59256.1.tar.bz2 into the dl directory

[~/R7800]$ mv NSS.AK.1.0.c8-00015.tar.bz2 qca-wifi-fw-QCA9984_hw_1-CNSS.BL.3.0.2-00068-S-1.59256.1.tar.bz2 dl/

You need a recent version of squashfs-tools installed to run this. The version that is built as part of this firmware build process is currently too old. Maybe someone will update it.

Or if you really want to do it manually:

1. Extract the rootfs. 7zip can do it.
2. Find /lib/firmware/qca-nss0-retail.bin and /lib/firmware/qca-nss1-retail.bin and extract them from image.
3. Rename them and put them in a directory tree as NSS.AK.1.0.c8-00015/R/retail_router0.bin and NSS.AK.1.0.c8-00015/R/retail_router1.bin.
4. Make a tarball named NSS.AK.1.0.c8-00015.tar.bz2 from this, e.g.:
   tar -jcf NSS.AK.1.0.c8-00015.tar.bz2 NSS.AK.1.0.c8-00015/
5. Put that tarball in the dl directory.

Building

Existing build instructions are out of date.

To build, have a Linux system with the necessary tools installed. There aren't very many and they are all common things that any distro should already have available to install with dnf, apt, pacman, or whatever your distro uses.

Copy the default R7800 config to to current config with:

cp configs/default-r7800 .config

Then run make:

make

That should be it. It should download all the individual packages and build everything.

The result will be the file bin/ipq806x/R7800-Vxxxxx.img.

Ignore the compile.sh script. It's for one specific person's system and there is no sense in using it.

Problems Building

If it dies why it's in the "Checking 'something'... ok." part at the beginning of the build, then you are missing some package that you should install.

If it's later on that it dies, then it's a good chance it couldn't download the package. See above about the "Wifi Firmware", you need to get that yourself!

The last package name printed out, like make[3] -C toolchain/gdb prepare or make[3] -C package/angular-loadcontent compile is probably the problem package (gdb and angular-loadcontent). You can probably turn it off it doesn't look useful to you. Do this by editing the .config file. Don't use make menuconfig to do it from the config menu, as that is broken.