ar7161 (WNDR3700 etc.) Overclock Patches for Gargoyle
Posted: Thu May 28, 2015 7:52 am
Hi everyone,
Before reading further, I am not gonna be held responsible if you brick your router with these. Before you use them, you should be able to say yes to the following statements:
1 - I can afford a new router.
2 - I don't want to buy a new router right now and a little extra speed (12-18%) will help me avoid doing that.
3 - I need more speed (e.g. routing isn't quite fast enough to max out my new VDSL2 connection, I want my VPN faster etc) and am not just doing this for fun.
4 - My router can be flashed using TFTP from the bootloader (before the OS boots) AND I know how to do this.
OK, so assuming you agree to those, there are plenty of reasons you might want more performance out of your existing router. For me, mine (WNDR3700v1) wasn't going quite fast enough to max out my new VDSL2, and I don't really feel like replacing it quite yet. An extra 12-18% (what you can expect with 680 -> 760/800MHz respectively) performance got me pretty much all the way to where I needed to be.
What these patches do is patch a core linux file to run the CPU faster than it would otherwise do. It's not the safest way to do overclocking as there's no way to turn it back down if you go too high UNLESS you can flash your router using TFTP from the bootloader (before the OS loads). Mine can do this. If yours can't and/or you don't know how to do it, then I'd advise against using these patches. That said, I haven't seen anyone out there saying that 800MHz wouldn't boot on these chips (though I have seen people saying it's unstable under max load...seems to work OK on mine).
There are patches out there to do this on standard OpenWRT, but applying them to Gargoyle is a bit fiddly (particularly if you need to clean your compile DIR) as the source for OpenWRT is only unzipped during compile. Using my modified patches makes it easy as you can just drop them into the root Gargoyle patches directory. Took me a while to work out how to do this as while I have an IT background, I'm not a programmer by occupation and so was not familiar with patch etc. Hopefully I can save some other enthusiasts some time here by posting these.
Once you've compiled Gargoyle and installed on your router, you can confirm the patch worked by using the command 'dmesg | grep "MHz" ' in an SSH terminal. Default speed is 680MHz, and you should now see 760/800 depending on the patch you used. Obviously, use only one at a time.
Original patches come from http://luci.subsignal.org/~trondah/stuff/ . I take no credit for those, just for making them easy to apply to Gargoyle. I've tested these only on WNDR3700v1, but they should work on other AR7161 based routers. If you're switching between the two, don't forget to 'make clean' your build dir in between (EDIT 3/1/16: Or use FULL_BUILD=true to save yourself the trouble of the slow source downloads again - but you must do a full build). Doesn't seem to rebuild the necessary components if you don't do this.
Once again, you're applying these patches at your own risk.
Before reading further, I am not gonna be held responsible if you brick your router with these. Before you use them, you should be able to say yes to the following statements:
1 - I can afford a new router.
2 - I don't want to buy a new router right now and a little extra speed (12-18%) will help me avoid doing that.
3 - I need more speed (e.g. routing isn't quite fast enough to max out my new VDSL2 connection, I want my VPN faster etc) and am not just doing this for fun.
4 - My router can be flashed using TFTP from the bootloader (before the OS boots) AND I know how to do this.
OK, so assuming you agree to those, there are plenty of reasons you might want more performance out of your existing router. For me, mine (WNDR3700v1) wasn't going quite fast enough to max out my new VDSL2, and I don't really feel like replacing it quite yet. An extra 12-18% (what you can expect with 680 -> 760/800MHz respectively) performance got me pretty much all the way to where I needed to be.
What these patches do is patch a core linux file to run the CPU faster than it would otherwise do. It's not the safest way to do overclocking as there's no way to turn it back down if you go too high UNLESS you can flash your router using TFTP from the bootloader (before the OS loads). Mine can do this. If yours can't and/or you don't know how to do it, then I'd advise against using these patches. That said, I haven't seen anyone out there saying that 800MHz wouldn't boot on these chips (though I have seen people saying it's unstable under max load...seems to work OK on mine).
There are patches out there to do this on standard OpenWRT, but applying them to Gargoyle is a bit fiddly (particularly if you need to clean your compile DIR) as the source for OpenWRT is only unzipped during compile. Using my modified patches makes it easy as you can just drop them into the root Gargoyle patches directory. Took me a while to work out how to do this as while I have an IT background, I'm not a programmer by occupation and so was not familiar with patch etc. Hopefully I can save some other enthusiasts some time here by posting these.
Once you've compiled Gargoyle and installed on your router, you can confirm the patch worked by using the command 'dmesg | grep "MHz" ' in an SSH terminal. Default speed is 680MHz, and you should now see 760/800 depending on the patch you used. Obviously, use only one at a time.
Original patches come from http://luci.subsignal.org/~trondah/stuff/ . I take no credit for those, just for making them easy to apply to Gargoyle. I've tested these only on WNDR3700v1, but they should work on other AR7161 based routers. If you're switching between the two, don't forget to 'make clean' your build dir in between (EDIT 3/1/16: Or use FULL_BUILD=true to save yourself the trouble of the slow source downloads again - but you must do a full build). Doesn't seem to rebuild the necessary components if you don't do this.
Once again, you're applying these patches at your own risk.