Installing OpenWRT 23.05 on Brume 1

Technical Support for Routers
1

This guide requires use of the command line, and covers using the extroot method of expanding storage to Brume’s entire 8GB flash.

Firmware image

The following instructions contain useful info if you are building your own firmware (beyond the scope) or downloading it (full instructions included).

Package list

Regardless of how you get your firmware image, you will need some packages on it.

Here are the packages I added to the default list provided in Firmware Selector in order to have a basic install out of the box along with tools to accomplish this guide. Because Brume 1 has 8GB of space, you don’t need to be too afraid of installing a few things.

luci luci-ssl luci-app-firewall luci-app-opkg luci-app-vnstat2 luci-app-ttyd rsync vim-full nano htop kmod-usb-storage kmod-usb-storage-uas kmod-fs-ext4 usbutils block-mount cfdisk

Download a custom build

You can request that the OpenWRT Firmware Selector make you a custom build with the following packages (plus whatever else you may want). Note that Luci is not included if you just download the default image without requesting a custom build.

  1. Visit https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/

  2. Navigate to the page for the GL-MV1000 Brume

  3. Click ‘Customize installed packages and/or first boot script’

  4. Paste the list of packages above at the end of the ‘Installed Packages’ list, plus add any others you want (dependencies will be satisfied)

  5. Click ‘Request Build’

  6. When the build finishes, download the ‘SDCARD (EXT4)’ version. Note that in this case ‘sdcard’ is a misnomer: the image will be installed to internal flash, and no microSD is needed or used.

  7. Decompress the .gz file you receive!! Firmware images are uploaded uncompressed.

Flashing

  1. Plug a computer set to 192.168.1.2/24 into one of the LAN ports.

  2. Power up the router with the reset button held down, and hold it til the lights come on, turn off, and then just WAN turns back on. Release the reset button at this point (don’t wait too long!)

  3. Ping 192.168.1.1 to verify connectivity.

  4. Open an incognito browser window (UBoot has bugs related to browser cache) and go to http://192.168.1.1/ where you should see the UBoot interface.

  5. Upload the decompressed firmware .img file.

  6. After a few minutes, the router should reboot and be alive at 192.168.1.1, Luci visible on SSL (assuming you installed those packages) at https://192.168.1.1, etc.

Note that if UBoot consistently fails, it may be outdated and you may need to update UBoot itself in order to install newer firmware images. Updating UBoot is possible by obtaining a UBoot firmware image (currently beyond the scope of this guide) and then visiting http://192.168.1.1/uboot.html in an incognito browser window when connected to the router in UBoot mode as below.

extroot (using the 8GB eMMC)

If you want to have full use of Brume’s 8GB storage to install gobs of packages, you must expand the root filesystem.

These instructions assume that you’ve installed appropriate tools (the packages are listed in the package lists above).

  1. connect to the router on the command line, e.g. ssh root@192.168.1.1

  2. # cfdisk /dev/mmcblk1

  3. create a new primary partition in the big empty space, should end up as mmcblk1p3

  4. # mkfs.ext4 -L extroot /dev/mmcblk1p3

  5. # mkdir /mnt/extroot; mount /dev/mmcblk1p3 /mnt/extroot

  6. # block detect | uci import fstab

  7. copy the root filesystem to /mnt/extroot, e.g. rsync -a -x / /mnt/extroot

  8. edit /etc/config/fstab:

    1. change the old root / filesystem to mount on /rom

    2. change the new filesystem mount point from /mnt/extroot to /overlay

    3. set enabled to 1 on both /rom and /overlay

  9. Reboot.

2 Likes