target: Disable building devices with 8M, 16M and 32M RAM

[Felix Baumann]

Am 20.05.2023 um 14:35 schrieb Fernando Frediani:
> Hi
>
> 8M and 16M should be fine to disable, but not 32M.
> There are plenty of very useful devices with 32M of RAM and OpenWrt is
> a life extender for them besides that work well.
>
> Even knowing there are newer devices with 64M+ people will no just
> throw away those other devicee to buy these new ones becausa of the
> extra RAM there in my view they should stay a little longer there.
>
> Fernando
>
> On Sat, 20 May 2023, 12:36 Felix Baumann, <felix.bau at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>     Hello,
>
>     I suggest disabling the build of devices with too little amount of ram
>     before the new release.
>     People who still need current openwrt versions for these devices
>     probably have to build them themselves in order for them to run with
>     this little amount of ram. (or stay on older releases instead)
>     Feedback is welcome.
>
>     This change hopefully prevents issues like this one from being
>     reported:
>     https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues/12554
>     Let's save people from themselves and free (some) buildbot
>     ressources at
>     the same time.
>
>     I used the ToH as my primary source but I also looked up lots of
>     devices
>     for some of the older targets, when the devices weren't present in
>     the ToH.
>     I most certaily missed a few 32M devices (due to missing ToH entries)
>     but these should be most of them.
>     I was surprised to find 8M and 16M RAM devices that are still being
>     built on a daily basis.
>
>     I couldn't find any ram specs on the following devices:
>     D-Link DWL-3150: amount of ram unknown, likely only 16M like the
>     others
>     (last remaining device in subtarget bcm47xx/legacy)
>     Argus ATP-52B, Omnima MiniEMBWiFi, Hauppauge Broadway, NexAira
>     Business
>     Class II : amount of ram unknown (subtarget ramips/rt3050x)
>
>     PR on GitHub:
>     https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/12672
>
>     Patch file:
>     https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/12672.patch
>     I know you prefer patches to be embedded into the mail on this list.
>     Maybe for another patch.
>
>     --
>     Regards
>     Felix Baumann
>
>
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>

Hi Fernando,

not sure why the mailinglist didn't forward your message above.
I agree with your sentiment, but my PR doesn't remove these devices, it
just stops OpenWrt's buildbot from building them.
Anyone can still build OpenWrt themselves and do the necessary kernel
adjustments and stuff to compile an OpenWrt that's actually bootlable.
We can't be bothered to guarantee bootable devices that won't brick on
sysupgrade, so devices with 32M RAM where already deprecated back in
OpenWrt 21:
https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/864_warning
It was just forgotten to also deactivate building them some of them back
then. Partially because they weren't in the ToH, partially because the
targets are barely used by developers, I think.
The release of OpenWrt 23 is as good a point as any to finally take this
step. Official support in case of issues was already canceled anyways.

Why I feel like this is necessary:
https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues/12554
https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/issues/10888

Users don't check release announcements and upgrade their devices
unknowingly.
Some still boot but eventually experience issues (mostly due to OOM
panics, squashfs trashing etc.).
Some instantly bootloop. This leads to a bad user experience. In the
second case the user wasn't able to recover via tftp :/ (cfe apparently
rejected official Linksys images)

Advanced users feel free to keep working with these devices, they are
still there. But from a maintainment point of view, it doesn't make
sense to officially build OpenWrt, when the default build config won't
run or can't be verified.
If anyone can confirm for any of the affected devices, that it still
runs fine since it's a development board, then feel free to open a PR
and discuss it with the devs :)
I feel like 32M of RAM is broken for release since release is build with
more packages like luci and ssl that require the ressources. But I also
never owned one of these devices, which is why I value feedback like
yours a lot :)

--
Regards
Felix Baumann