Malformed soft_ver on TP-Link Archer AX21 #59
Description
Not sure this really needs to be addressed as it only affects the ability to revert to the stock firmware, but I can see this tripping people up once the Archer AX21 support is fully enabled in the official OpenWRT builds:
In the recently added support for the Archer AX21 hardware in tplink-safeloader, the soft_ver field is set to a malformed text version string, as it is missing the "soft_ver:" prefix. All the other hardware models that use the SOFT_VER_TEXT macro include that prefix in their version text, so I suspect that is not what the author of the change (@andrewjlamarche, I believe) intended.
As a result of this, it appears both the TP-Link stock firmware's firmware update page and the bootloader's recovery web loader interpret that version info as binary version info, so it thinks the version is 46.48.46 (ASCII values for ., 0, and .). While this is not a problem for installation of OpenWRT factory.bin using the stock firmware's firmware update page, since that allows version upgrades, it causes problems when reverting to stock firmware, similar to those that have been reported on AX23.
What's worse, though, is the recovery web loader seems to get really confused by this binary version info and attempt to load a factory.bin with it fails in a way that leaves the router in a soft brick state, that as far as I can tell, requires tftpboot to recover from, which requires serial access.
I know that reverting to stock via the sysupgrade process is expected to have some version number weirdness, but I have found that if soft_ver is set appropriately in the factory.bin that was originally used to upload OpenWRT firmware, the recovery web loader does a fine job of reinstalling the stock firmware. I find that to be a much easier method than the sysupgrade path. I've been testing with .soft_ver = SOFT_VER_TEXT("soft_ver:1.1.0\n"), since the current stock firmware version is 1.1.3.