Hello!
Lots of devices I have upgraded from like 6.48 to 7.12 complains in the log that there is not enough disk space to perform upgrade so it was aborted. 7.11.2 as an intermediate step and then flashing 7.12 has always worked for me. It is like if the 6.4x firmware can’t handle the 7.12 file format when calculating the needed space for it. I’ve seen this on hEX S and RB450Gx4 and the the storage has been empty except for the 7.12 firmware file and maybe a small .rsc of device config.
There are also a post in the release thread indicating 7.12.1 has this problem on hAP ac2 too so it doesn’t seem to be just me who has some bad luck.
Is this a known problem? Should I file a bug report? I rather not have to keep saving older firmwares as intermediate ones if not absolutely necessary.
Hard to verify (I’m beyond 6.x since ages), but it could be that 7.11.2 has slightly smaller footprint than 6.4x (you’re starting from) so there’s more space for whatever temporary files ROS needs to overwrite itself.
Not sure this is about disk space at all since a RB450Gx2 has 512 megabyte and I had 82% free when I encountered this. I think there is a bug here somewhere which erroneously determinate the needed space or something…
I Have many HAP AC2 devices for PPPOE and zerotier scattered across the country, all of them will not upgrade to 7.13 due to space constraints, using netinstall to flash to 7.13 is not an option due to the distance between homebase and most of them, What is the solution if any.
There is no solution for now. We can only hope that MT devs manage to reduce package size a bit further.
A temporary solution is to uninstall any optional packages (you mentioned zerotier), upgrade and then re-install optional packages. But beware that 16MB flash on ARM devices (hAP ac2, cAP ac, etc.) is really tight, 7.13 + wifi-qcom-ac ends up with only 200kB free flash (so quite probably not enough to install zerotier package) and that can fill up after a while if device works as AP+router combo (happened to me).
So real long-term solution is to use these devices with 16MB flash storage as simple APs and replace them with devices with decent flash storage if any other function is required … not to mention if any other optional package has to be installed. It seems that these devices will become obsolete soon … even though this obsolescence might not be actually planned.
We’ve been bitching about 16MB flash storage being too little, but a couple of years ago MT people claimed that 16MB is plenty (and MT introduced a few other 16MB models after we started to complain). It seems this claim is going to history in the same department as the “640kB RAM is enough for everybody” (about which we don’t accurately know the source).
I’ve been experiencing issues with CAP AC and HAP AC2 due to insufficient disk space. With this update to version 7.14, the space usage has improved significantly, in some cases by as much as 100 kB
The problem with this change log bullet is that with ROS 7.13+ one would really want to run wifi-qcom-ac on these devices. And storage consumption of this package wasn’t improved at all.
Yesterday I did a netinstall to v7 on SXTsq Lite2 and was surprised to find there was no (old) wireless menu.
It turns out it’s now in an additional package.
Of course remaining space is now a concern.
Meanwhile, if I install OpenWRT on SXTsq Lite2, there is still 10MiB of space remaining.
It is enough to install attended sysupgrade + nano + dnscrypt-proxy2 + oisd blocklist (small).
And still have 4MiB left.