Changelog

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v0.5.1 (2026-05-13)

Fixes the first-boot failure after mix burn:

erlinit: No release found in /srv/erlang.
erlinit: Erlang installation not found.

Root cause: mix firmware baked the system-prebuilt data/openwrt-one-initramfs.itb and data/openwrt-one-nand.ubi into the .fw — both assembled at system build time, before the user's Erlang release was merged into the squashfs. mix burn then wrote the stale UBI to the recovery USB stick; after the USB dance, the board booted into an initramfs with no /srv/erlang. The OTA path (mix upload) avoided the bug by re-running wrap-firmware.sh at upload time to rebuild a per-app .itb from the .fw's squashfs.

Fix: a new openwrt_one.firmware_post Mix task rebuilds both resources from the .fw's combined squashfs and splices them back into the .fw archive, updating length / blake2b-256 in meta.conf and preserving zip entry order. Users wire it into the mix firmware lifecycle with a one-line alias in their mix.exs:

defp aliases do
  [firmware: ["firmware", "openwrt_one.firmware_post"]]
end

With the alias in place, mix firmware produces a .fw whose bundled .itb and .ubi already match the user release, so mix burn and mix upload both work natively against the bundled resources — no per-invocation repack.

Changes:

  • New Mix.Tasks.OpenwrtOne.FirmwarePost in lib/mix/tasks/. Requires ubinize (from mtd-utils) and b2sum (from coreutils) on the host.
  • scripts/upload-ota.sh: extract data/openwrt-one-initramfs.itb directly from the .fw instead of re-running wrap-firmware.sh. Errors out with the alias snippet if the resource is missing or zero-sized.
  • scripts/wrap-firmware.sh: also search ~/.nerves/artifacts/.../host/{sbin,bin} for ubinize and mkenvimage (Nerves caches artifacts there, not under $SYSTEM_DIR/.nerves/artifacts); fail with an install hint instead of warning + skipping when ubinize cannot be found.
  • mix.exs: ship lib/ in the hex package so the Mix task is picked up when the system is used as a dep.
  • README.md: document mtd-utils and coreutils as host prerequisites; new "Step 1: wire up the firmware-post alias" section before "build the firmware and prepare a USB stick".

v0.5.0 (2026-05-08)

Breaking: the embedded NervesSystemOpenwrtOne.UBootEnvKVBackend is gone. It now lives in its own Hex package, nerves_uboot_env_ubi, under the Nerves.Runtime.KVBackend.UBootEnvUBI module.

Migration in your firmware app:

  • Add to mix.exs deps:
    {:nerves_uboot_env_ubi, "~> 0.1"}
  • Update config/target.exs:
    config :nerves_runtime,
  kv_backend: {Nerves.Runtime.KVBackend.UBootEnvUBI, []}
  • The system dep can now stay runtime: false (the Nerves convention) since the system no longer ships any runtime BEAM modules.

Why: keeping the backend in the system forced users to drop runtime: false on the system dep so the backend's BEAMs got included in their release. That's a non-obvious footgun, and extracting the backend lets it be properly tested + documented + reused on other UBI-flash boards.

This release also rolls up the v0.4.x churn (which never made it to Hex):

  • nerves_system_br 1.33.4 → 1.33.7 (OTP 28.5, fwup 1.16.0, Buildroot 2025.11.3) — already shipped as v0.2.3.
  • aarch64 toolchain 13.2.0 → 14.2.0 (GCC 13 → GCC 14) for multi-target compatibility with sibling Nerves systems.
  • BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_UBOOT_TOOLS_FIT_SUPPORT=y so Buildroot's host mkimage works inside Docker on macOS.
  • wrap-firmware.sh no longer needs sudo — uses cpio --owner=0:0 to force ownership and unsquashfs runs as the invoking user. Drops the --reproducible flag which BSD cpio (macOS) doesn't support.
  • BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_UBOOT_TOOLS_FIT_SUPPORT and host-dtc for build-time mkimage; mix burn USB-stick recovery flow; persistent /root via UBIFS on UBI volume 5 with lazy mkfs.ubifs; nerves_motd "Part usage" cell now reports real numbers.

v0.4.4 (2026-05-07)

  • wrap-firmware.sh: use numeric cpio --owner=0:0 instead of root:root. BSD cpio (macOS default) tries to look up "root" as a group name and fails because the gid-0 group on macOS is "wheel", not "root". Numeric IDs are portable everywhere.

v0.4.3 (2026-05-07)

  • wrap-firmware.sh: drop cpio --reproducible. It's a GNU cpio extension; BSD cpio (macOS default) rejects it with Option --reproducible is not supported. Reproducible byte output isn't actually needed — the cpio just has to be a valid initramfs.

v0.4.2 (2026-05-07)

Fix v0.4.1's regression: OTA boots failed because the bundled build-time cpio.gz was the system-only rootfs without the user's release at /srv/erlang, so erlinit died with "No release found" and the device rolled back.

  • wrap-firmware.sh is back to unpacking the combined squashfs rootfs and repacking as cpio.gz, but now without sudo:
    • unsquashfs runs as the invoking user (files come out user- owned, content intact).
    • cpio --owner=root:root forces ownership in the output cpio regardless of disk owners, so the result is byte-equivalent to the old sudo-based path.
    • /dev/console is no longer pre-created with mknod; /init mounts devtmpfs first which provides it.
  • Reverts the rootfs.cpio.gz resource added to fwup.conf in v0.4.1 — no longer needed, .fw shrinks by ~9 MiB.

v0.4.1 (2026-05-07)

OTA upload was supposed to work on macOS without sudo prompts. This release was BROKEN — see v0.4.2 for the actual fix.

  • wrap-firmware.sh no longer unsquashes the rootfs and re-cpio's it on the host. Previously this required sudo unsquashfs, sudo mknod /dev/console, and sudo cpio, which broke when invoked non-interactively (e.g. mix upload on macOS, where sudo can't prompt without a TTY).
  • fwup.conf now bundles the build-time rootfs.cpio.gz alongside rootfs.img in the .fw archive. wrap-firmware.sh extracts it directly into the FIT image — no transformation needed.
  • Costs ~9 MiB extra in the .fw (the cpio.gz copy), but eliminates the sudo dependency end-to-end.

v0.4.0 (2026-05-07)

Toolchain bump to align with sibling Nerves systems on aarch64.

  • nerves_toolchain_aarch64_nerves_linux_gnu 13.2.0 → 14.2.0 (GCC 13 → GCC 14). Buildroot toolchain URL + BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL_GCC_* flag updated to match.
  • Enables BR2_PACKAGE_HOST_UBOOT_TOOLS_FIT_SUPPORT=y so Buildroot's host mkimage is built with FIT support and host-dtc as a dependency. Without it, building inside the Nerves Docker container on macOS failed at the post-image step with "sh: 1: -I: not found".

The toolchain change forces a full system rebuild on first build, but no source/API changes.

v0.3.0 (2026-05-07)

/root (and /data via the existing symlink) is now persistent across reboots, matching standard Nerves convention.

  • rootfs_data (UBI volume 5) is now mounted at /root via a small --pre-run-exec script (/usr/sbin/mount-data.sh). The script lazily formats the volume with UBIFS on first boot and falls back to tmpfs if the persistent mount can't be brought up, so the device always boots even with unhealthy NAND. Without this, /root lived in the volatile rootfs (initramfs) and SSH host keys, NervesTime RTC drift fixes, etc. were regenerated on every reboot.
  • mkfs.ubifs (BR2_PACKAGE_MTD_MKFSUBIFS=y) is now built into the target image so the lazy-format step works.
  • nerves_fw_application_part0_devpath=/root (and fstype=ubifs, target=/root) is now baked into the U-Boot env, so nerves_motd resolves the data partition for its "Part usage" cell instead of falling back to "not available".

Backwards compatibility: existing v0.2.x installs upgrade cleanly. The first boot of v0.3.0 formats rootfs_data (which was an empty placeholder volume in v0.2.x). Rollback to v0.2.x is fine — the older slot's initramfs ignores the UBIFS, runs in volatile mode.

v0.2.3 (2026-05-06)

Routine upstream bump.

  • nerves_system_br 1.33.4 → 1.33.7
    • Erlang/OTP 28.4.1 → 28.5
    • fwup 1.14.0 → 1.16.0
    • Buildroot 2025.11.2 → 2025.11.3

No system-side changes required.

v0.2.2 (2026-04-09)

mix burn support via OpenWrt's NOR full-recovery mode.

  • mix burn now prepares a FAT32 USB recovery stick that OpenWrt's SPI NOR recovery U-Boot can use to flash the entire SPI NAND — no serial console, no TFTP server, no typing of U-Boot commands. The stick contains the snand-preloader.bin (BL2) and our openwrt-one-nand.ubi (renamed to factory.ubi). See README.md "Initial install" for the full procedure.
  • Ship prebuilt/openwrt-one-snand-preloader.bin from OpenWrt 24.10 (same source + license as the FIP).
  • fwup.conf: replace the erroring complete task with one that mbr_writes + fat_mkfses + fat_writes the recovery files. The .fw file grows by ~33 MiB (the .ubi) + 234 KiB (preloader) but mix burn now Just Works with no per-app config.
  • post-createfs.sh: stage the preloader into images/ so fwup can find it at firmware-build time.
  • README: document USB stick recovery as the primary initial-install path; serial + TFTP demoted to "alternative".

v0.2.1 (2026-04-08)

USB mass storage support.

  • Linux: enable CONFIG_SCSI, CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD, CONFIG_USB_STORAGE, CONFIG_FAT_FS + CONFIG_VFAT_FS, CONFIG_EXFAT_FS, and the matching NLS tables (CP437, ISO8859-1, UTF-8). USB sticks now enumerate as /dev/sdN and FAT/exFAT partitions mount and read.

v0.2.0 (2026-04-08)

OTA + A/B slot support, kernel bump, several bug fixes that turned session-1 workarounds into proper fixes.

Added

  • A/B FIT slots: UBI layout now uses fit_a (vol 3) and fit_b (vol 4) instead of a single fit volume. Each slot is sized at 50 MiB. Active slot is selected at boot via fit_${nerves_fw_active} substitution in ubi_read_production.
  • Image-level boot fallback: if bootm fails on the active slot, U-Boot's boot_production flips nerves_fw_active, saveenvs, and retries the other slot.
  • Bootcount-based runtime rollback: OTA sets upgrade_available=1
    • bootcount=0; U-Boot's nerves_count_attempt script swaps slots once bootcount > bootlimit (default 3). Nerves.Runtime.StartupGuard clears the counters once the app is healthy.
  • scripts/upload-ota.sh + scripts/apply-ota.exs: volume-level OTA via SFTP + ubiupdatevol + fw_setenv. Designed to be aliased as mix upload from the user app.
  • NervesSystemOpenwrtOne.UBootEnvKVBackend: custom Nerves.Runtime.KVBackend that reads via the Erlang UBootEnv library and writes via the C fw_setenv (which issues UBI_IOCVOLUP). Without this the default backend returns :eperm on every KV.put and breaks validate_firmware/0.
  • Full OpenWrt 24.10 default U-Boot env baked into ubootenv volumes via prebuilt/uboot-env-template.txt, with the 0x1F000 env size matching CONFIG_ENV_SIZE in OpenWrt's mt7981 U-Boot. Eliminates the cosmetic boardid: U-boot environment CRC32 mismatch warning that was caused by sizing our env smaller than what U-Boot writes back.
  • CONFIG_IP_ADVANCED_ROUTER=y, CONFIG_IP_MULTIPLE_TABLES=y, CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_MULTIPATH=y so VintageNet's policy-routing setup doesn't crash with RTNETLINK answers: Operation not supported.

Changed

  • Linux 6.12 → 6.18.12.
  • SPI NAND driver path: dropped the spi-mtk-snfi attempt and the Etron 0x77-shifted-manufacturer-ID workaround. Now uses spi-mt65xx with the OpenWrt SPI calibration patch stack (patches 121, 330, 431-435, 930) plus mtk_bmt. The chip is actually a Winbond 256 MiB part, not the 128 MiB Etron we initially guessed.
  • U-Boot env path in fw_env.config: /dev/ubi0_0 and /dev/ubi0_1 instead of /dev/ubi0:ubootenv. The Erlang uboot_env library uses plain File.open and doesn't understand the :volname shorthand that fwup-tool's fw_printenv accepts.

Fixed

  • mkimage invocation in wrap-firmware.sh now prefers /usr/bin/mkimage over Buildroot's host build, because the latter ships with MKIMAGE_DTC="" and explodes with sh: 1: -I: not found whenever it tries to run dtc internally.

v0.1.0 (2026-04-07)

Initial Nerves system for the OpenWRT One.

  • Linux 6.12 mainline kernel with small patches
  • Custom DTS based on mainline mt7981b-openwrt-one.dts with full peripheral enablement
  • WiFi 2.4 / 5 GHz with proper calibration from factory partition
  • Both Ethernet ports (1 GbE LAN + 2.5 GbE WAN with EN8811H PHY)
  • RTC, GPIO watchdog, LEDs, buttons
  • NAND boot via UBI volumes (fip + fit + ubootenv + rootfs_data)
  • Pre-built FIP from official OpenWrt 24.10 release