[LEDE-DEV] ar71xx kernel size starts getting oversized

[Yousong Zhou]

On 4 June 2016 at 12:49, Yousong Zhou <yszhou4tech at gmail.com> wrote:
> Several days ago I tried to build a firmware for HiWiFi-HC6361 with
> LEDE master branch.  Yet the firmware was not present in
> bin/targets/ar71xx/generic after the build completed.  I checked the
> downloads.lede-project.org the firmware was also missing there.
>
> The problem is that mtdparts layout of HC6361 requires the kernel part
> to be not bigger than 1280KB (1310720 bytes).  Yet the lzma-compressed
> kernel uImage has exceeded this size limit.
>
> The current size of lede-ar71xx-generic-uImage-lzma.bin in
> downloads.lede-project.org is 1367988
>
> The corresponding file in OpenWrt downloads site are as follows
>
>     snapshot         1295637
>     15.05.1            1176662
>     14.07               1107048
>
> My device is currently running 4.1.16 with OpenWrt r48975.  So the
> bloat probably comes from the 4.4 bump.  Sorry that at the moment I
> can just bring the issue up and cannot find time to do further
> investigation.

Comparing config-4.1 before the bump with config-4.4, and config-3.10
from bb branch and config-4.4, it seems that the size increase
probably comes from Open Firmware device tree support recently
introduced to ath79 mach  :(

                yousong

>
> Regards
>
>                 yousong