Provide ability to use a local/custom openwrt-imagebuilder

[everloop2]

For development/adding "new" boxes its sometimes necessary to alter kernel options:

• for example lantiq:xrx200 (O²Box6431) in: /openwrt/target/linux/lantiq/files-4.14/arch/mips/boot/dts/VGV7510KW22.dtsi -> bootargs -> remove: mem=62M vpe1_load_addr=0x83e00000 vpe1_mem=2M maxvpes=1 maxtcs=1 nosmp to enable SMP
• or add/remove kernel modules/packages -> make kernel_menuconfig
• or Openwrt 19.07: lantiq: ar9: xway: kernel: enable SMP support #64 Openwrt 19.07: lantiq: ar9: xway: kernel: enable SMP support

to get them to working / desired state.

Would be a great benefit for development/testing of Freifunk firmwares, due upstream changes in OpenWrt sometimes get added pretty slow (missing reviews) or are even stalled.

[Akira25]

Well, the main goal of falter is, to use (hopefully stable) pre-compiled OpenWrt-imagebuilders. As 99% of the packages are platform agnostic, there shouldn't be any issues that happen on one router, but not another one. (One exception is that CPU-load/LED-Bug on CPE210v1)
We consider the OpenWrt-base as stable and don't want to modify it (-> patches shall go upstream).

Though for developing you're right.
Is there really a need for you to compile explicitly Freifunk-Firmwares while porting a router to OpenWrt? If you need to modify internal things, the OpenWrt build system and its tricks and tweaks match far better for you purpose.

If you still want to have real Freifunk-images, maybe that is an option for you:
Once you've found a working configuration, you could compile an openwrt imagebuilder from that and use that one in the falter buildsystem, to assemble the images.

[everloop2]

If you still want to have real Freifunk-images, maybe that is an option for you:
Once you've found a working configuration, you could compile an openwrt imagebuilder from that and use that one in the falter buildsystem, to assemble the images.

How to? Tried to modify /builter/build_falter script to use custom_imagebuilder - so far no luck :/

Custom or SMP enabled imagebuilder would be nice: #64 (comment)

[pmelange]

I have been doing my own compilations (not of openwrt, but the falter feed) in a local directoy and using a modified build_falter script to use that feed. I don't know quite yet how to do it with the most recent build_fater script... yet.

But I image it should be possible to use the openwrt build environment to generate a specialzied sdk and imagebuilder with your own patches in it. Then those could be fed into the build_falter script to generate images in the "falter" way.

[Akira25]

@everloop2 There's a draft on that here. But it's really hacky and maybe not fully working.