[GSoC] Automatic Extraction of OpenWrt Firmware Image Metadata

[nemesifier]

Official thread for this GSoC idea, ask questions and announce your interest here.

[nemesifier]

Nobody has expressed interest in this, but I believe it's a low hanging fruit. I spent a good amount of time researching this and both feasibility and specs look pretty good to me, should not be hard to achieve.

[asmodehn]

Also it will be a nice improvement to the firmware builds, as managing them will become easier to use correctly. since most things manual steps will be automated.

[atif09]

Hi im interested in this, and I was researching about dealing with non sysupgrade images, have questions regarding that too and ill get back soon

[Eeshu-Yadav]

@nemesifier
I Noticed FirmwareImageInline.has_change_permission Returns False Once Saved — What Was the Original Intent?

While reading admin.py, I saw that FirmwareImageInline.has_change_permission(self, request, obj) returns False when obj exists. This makes images fully immutable in the admin after creation — you can't edit any fields.
But the metadata extraction feature requires images in a "failed" state to have editable metadata fields so users can manually fill in board/target info. This seems to conflict with the current immutability design.
I'm curious about the original reasoning: was this to prevent accidental metadata changes that could break existing device pairings, or was it simply "images are binary blobs, nothing useful to edit"? Understanding this helps me figure out whether relaxing it conditionally (based on image status) is safe, or if there's a deeper invariant I should preserve by using a separate confirmation action/view instead of inline editing.

[nemesifier]

There's issues and pull requests dealing with these aspects in the fw-upgrader module.

[atif09]

since hardware.py is a static map of filename to board names, once fwtool extraction is done successfully, the long term plan is to keep it as fallback right?

[nemesifier]

I don't see this as viable, it would be cumbersome. The goal is to make it obsolete and remove it completely.