OpenWrt

Status: Work just begun

• CPU Atheros AR7161 680MHz (800MHz option supported)
• Memory 256MB DDR SDRAM onboard memory
• Data storage 128MB onboard NAND memory chip and microSD slot for expansion
• Ethernet Three 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet ports with Auto-MDI/X
• miniPCI Five miniPCI Type IIIA/IIIB slots
• Expansion Two USB 2.0 ports with powering (5V 1A supply)
• DB9 RS232C asynchronous serial port

The generic Bildroot installation creates bootable ramdiskfs image. buildroot.exigence

NOTES:
- I didn't need to install subversion. It was installed by default on my linux desktop.
- I run make menuconfig and choose
* Target System (Atheros71xx/…)
* Subtarget (Device with NAND flash …)
* Target Images → *ramdisk, *tar.gz
- Run make
- The image is in ./bin/ar71xx/openwrt-ar71xx-nand-vmlinux-initramfs.elf
- You need to copy this image into your tftpboot directory.

I started the routerboard with netboot. NetBoot

NOTES:
- Worked fine - remember to open the udp port 69 and high-ports (udp) in your firewall

- Ethernet ports, USB ports and PCI cards does not work

To be continued

The previous steps describe the basic building and starting up process of OpenWrt on Mikrotik RouterBoards. Since this is not sufficient because you need to install OpenWrt on the NAND and/or another storage device (USB,SD) there is a requirement for configure or patch the linux kernel to support all of the hardware components.

For some of those hardware parts (USB ports, Ethernet ports..) it (probably) will be sufficient to rebuild the kernel image with personalized kernel configuration.
For others the kernel source itself will have to be patched.

Link to the discussion about the development process: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=33833