[LEDE-DEV] Release planning

[Alberto Bursi]

> On 2016-12-21 20:13, Jo-Philipp Wich wrote:
> - Are there any outstanding changes?
>    Is there important changes we should wait for before branching the
>    release? Is there pending stuff in the staging trees which should
>    absolutely go into the first release?
>

Imho an important issue that has to be addressed before release is the 
OOM issues opkg has in devices with 32MiB of RAM.

LEDE supports a around 380 devices with that ram. (according to the ToH [1])
Around half of these devices (around 180) seem to have 8 MiB or even 
more Flash, so it's reasonable to expect that opkg works for them.

Many people upgrading from OWRT will start getting hard OOM failures 
when using opkg on devices where it worked fine in OWRT CC.


In the bug thread [2] I proposed a possible solution that should be easy 
to implement for someone that knows opkg source already (I also have a 
32 MiB device ready to test any patch):

In low ram devices have opkg download package lists every time it needs 
to read them, don't keep them in tmpfs.
Like "download -pipe- extract -pipe- read" without passing from tmpfs.
This will murder its performance as it will need to wait for the 
download of all lists each time you use it, but should keep it usable.

This trick shouldn't trigger the OOM as the current workaround is to 
comment out some of the feeds (telephony and luci for example) from the 
opkg feed list so they aren't downloaded, and that works fine.
This might even allow opkg to work in devices with 16 MiB of ram.

1. 
https://lede-project.org/toh/views/toh_extended_all?dataflt%5BRAM+MB*%7E%5D=32
2. 
https://bugs.lede-project.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=120&only_watched=1&type%5B0%5D=&sev%5B0%5D=&due%5B0%5D=&cat%5B0%5D=&status%5B0%5D=open&percent%5B0%5D=&reported%5B0%5D=

-Alberto