Linux and MIKROTIK

Hardware MikroTik hardware general
1

I would like to use on my MIKROTIK hardware linux (Slackware) instead of the RouterOS.
There are few questions which I would need help. My choice of routerboard is 435G.

  1. I see in the documentation that this hardware contains the AR7100 680MHz network processor. Will the linux kernel work with this CPU?
  2. I can see that there are two USB2 ports available. I used to install my Slackware system to USB memory but this requires that the hardware can boot from USB. Can the RouterBOARD boot from USB? Or is there some different way how to boot into USB partition? I found this link http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/RB500_Linux_SDK . It notes some BIOS where I can set - o - boot device in the options.
2
  1. Possibly, but with great effort from your side
  2. That SDK is some 5 years old and doesn’t apply to any current RouterBOARD models. We don’t have any SDK for RB435G
3

Thanks for your answer, I am aware of that. I was expecting that it is going to be difficult.

Right now I am trying to boot up the hardware from the network.
The next step will be to build the required software image which I can boot into.

Ok netboot is working now. It tries to download a vmlinux (image?) then it shows that it is setting up elf image , the result is that its not an elf header.
It is possible to set the routerboard to boot into different format of kernel image (not elf)?
Or - do somebody know something about this elf image, it is possible to build a kernel image from source as an elf image?

4

Google for this, there are a few guides out there:
http://blog.vodkamelone.de/archives/148-Installing-OpenWrt-on-a-Microtik-Routerboard-RB433.html
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/rb450g

5

zoltan, consider OpenWrt instead of Slackware. It is pretty good linux distribution targeted to embedded usage and already is prepared for Mikrotik. All you have to do is customize, complile and load into Routerboard.

6

Thanks. I built successfully the kernel image with the OpenWrt tools. I am able to boot the routerboard into this kernel image. As I was expecting now I need to tell somehow to the bootloader (or kernel) where it finds the root partition. I get this error now:

Please append a correct “root=” boot option; here are the available partitions:
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

Right now I am looking for solution. I think I will need to build an initial ramdisk (initrd) which will finally tell the kernel that the root partition is on the USB flash memory.

7

I think the WRT forums are better for this discussion. Most (if not all?) people here are running RouterOS.