20.xx: Major changes

This site intends to give an overview over major changes since 19.07, focusing on those that will require adjustments/adaption downstream.

The idea is to give a broad overview like a Table of Contents, without too much details on the specific issues.

With 20.xx not close yet, this may be seen as a tracker of big changes in master for now.

Recently, most obvious through the transition from ar71xx to ath79, we tried to make device/image names more systematic by applying a vendor_model-variant scheme.

This has already been used in 19.07 in some cases (ath79, ipq40xx, ipq806x, mpc85xx, new ramips devices, ...).

After 19.07 had been released, the attempt was made to apply this more widely, and use the momentum to also achieve a more unified and systematic naming scheme for the different locations where the “device name” is used in its variations:

• device name in image/Makefile (will be used for image name)
• DEVICE_TITLE in image/Makefile
• DTS file name (soc_vendor_model or soc-vendor-model)
• DTS model name
• DTS compatible
• board_name (which should be derived from compatible instead of setting board names manually)
• SUPPORTED_DEVICES

The following subchapters will provide details on which changes have been applied to which targets so far.

In 20.xx, ar71xx will finally be dropped. As already relevant in 19.07, ath79 impl

To make device names more systematic, the DEVICE_TITLE make variable (primarily used for display in make menuconfig) was split into DEVICE_VENDOR, DEVICE_MODEL and DEVICE_VARIANT for all targets. DEVICE_TITLE is still available as (simplified)

DEVICE_TITLE := $(DEVICE_VENDOR) $(DEVICE_MODEL) $(DEVICE_VARIANT)

During this update process, we took the opportunity to make names more systematic. Thus, several DEVICE_TITLEs will have changed effectively.

Despite, a new syntax to specify alternate device names has been introduced (ALT0 to ALT3):

DEVICE_ALT0_VENDOR
DEVICE_ALT0_MODEL
DEVICE_ALT0_VARIANT

As for DEVICE_TITLE, those will not affect image names.

Many devices supported by OpenWrt bear one or many MAC addresses on them, which allow to identify those devices in large network. This fact has been exploited by downstream communities, which implemented those addresses locally. OpenWrt has now added a mechanism to store and retrieve those addresses:

Developer reference: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/mac.address#label_mac_address

Use:

. /lib/functions.sh
. /lib/functions/system.sh
label_mac_addr=$(get_mac_label)
}

The label MAC address has to be provided in OpenWrt on a per-device basis. While a lot of devices has already been covered, there also is still a lot of devices to take care of.