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jamesmacwhite / hh70-ee

Unofficial documentation/wiki of the EE branded Alcatel HH70VB router (4GEE Home Router)
MIT License
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Porting OpenWRT to HH70 Device #4

Open ahmedarif193 opened 4 months ago

ahmedarif193 commented 4 months ago

First, I would like to commend you on the excellent documentation and detailed work regarding the HH70 device. It's truly impressive and helpful!

I noticed that while there has been extensive work done on the device itself, there hasn't been any attempt to port OpenWRT to it. Given the success and community interest in porting OpenWRT to devices like the HH40, I believe the HH70, with its excellent quality and price, would greatly benefit from such an effort.

I'm curious if there are specific reasons why this hasn't been attempted yet. Is it due to technical constraints, lack of interest, or something else?

Additionally, I am willing to contribute my efforts to this project. However, I would like to know more about the device's U-Boot capabilities. Specifically, in the event of a soft brick, does the U-Boot of the HH70 allow for a recovery or flashing process?

jamesmacwhite commented 4 months ago

Hi! It's been a long time since I did anything with the HH70. Porting OpenWrt to it would make it much more usable, but in reality it is probably a combination of all of areas you just mentioned of why no one's done it.

The device itself is very old now, I still have an EE branded one, but don't use it. My original intention was to gain access through the previous closed SSH access and see some of the inner workings, which was achieved after a rather long reverse engineering attempt with the backup and restore process, which turned out to be completely unnecessary given the WPS button trick, enables SSH for you! However until seeing the filesystem I had no idea that existed, but it hopefully make gaining SSH access easier for others, rather than doing some crude hex edit on a the backup.tar.gz to manipulate the payload.

It is unlikely that there's much interest in porting OpenWrt to it. From what I remember the device has small flash space and realistically, you'd be needing to run a very small build, possibly with a lot of things stripped out, I'm not even sure the latest OpenWrt version or old stable could even run on it, making it already an EOL OpenWrt device. Even for when it was supported, it was pretty low end hardware for the time.

The documentation made was purely for historic/any further reverse engineering efforts made. I don't have the knowledge for doing an OpenWrt port, but if someone is willing then they can go ahead and use any of the information present of course.

ahmedarif193 commented 4 months ago

from tryS0 logs: [ 1.771983] msm_nand_scan: NAND Id: 0x2690ac2c Buswidth: 8Bits Density: 512 MByte

the hardware in question has a decent amount of storage for a low-end device, don't you think so? especially considering that it is priced around $50 (i bought one and i should receive it next week). most hardware i worked with does not go more than 32mbytes mtd memory chips and they are wifi6 capable. btw hh40 is also maintained with kernel 6.6.

this hardware uses the ipq4019 soc with 4 cores armv7 i guess, which is well-supported in openwrt under the target name ipq40xx, with several devices maintained under the ipq40xx varieties. i have the expertise to port this, but only if CONFIG_PROC_DEVICETREE was enabled to retrieve the dtb. additionally, access to a non-closed uboot would be ideal for this process in case of a soft brick!

overall, your progress and achievements are impressive even if you did it the hard way !