Tor support prerequisites

[XXL]

I went through some of the forum posts on here and remain confused about the hardware requirements that the support of Tor imposes on Gargoyle. Perhaps someone could clear out a few questions:

a) How much NVRAM is really needed in order for Tor to run flawlessly? I stumbled upon statements that 4 MiB is not enough - does this mean that Tor feature is disabled on such models? Or is it present, but simply doesn't function properly? A similar statement was made towards some of the 8 MiB models, but in general it should work?

b) I read somewhere that if there is no USB support (in hardware? in firmware?), then there will be no Tor support. Is this true? If so, why?

c) Is there anything else that might influence Tor operation, apart from the above 2 points? Can anyone recommend an affordable router solution, given that it would properly run Tor on Gargoyle? 100Mbit links are totally OK and WiFi is not an obligatory necessity, either.

Now to my final question. How is Tor support maintained on Gargoyle? I noticed that the Tor Bundle informs you to upgrade on a Windows-based OS, if there's an update available (via HTTP checking). Although I don't know if those updates actually change the tor.exe or the portable browser. I assume it's the actual binary of the service. Does this mean that Gargoyle is going to be running an outdated version of the Tor package until the next firmware release, given that there were official updates of the Tor software project in the mean time?

Thank you.

[ispyisail]

http://www.gargoyle-router.com/wiki/doku.php?id=tor

Tor with Gargoyle provides plug and play anonymous access to the internet. Routers running Gargoyle 1.5.1 and above with a USB port have support Tor. It can be run on a router with 32MB of memory only if SWAP is enabled, but 64MB is recommended.

Recommended routers include

Ubiquiti Routerstation
Ubiquiti Routerstation Pro
Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH
Netgear WNDR3700v1-2

b) I read somewhere that if there is no USB support (in hardware? in firmware?), then there will be no Tor support. Is this true? If so, why?

Because routers with USB ports tend to be more powerful.

Now to my final question. How is Tor support maintained on Gargoyle? I noticed that the Tor Bundle informs you to upgrade on a Windows-based OS, if there's an update available (via HTTP checking). Although I don't know if those updates actually change the tor.exe or the portable browser. I assume it's the actual binary of the service. Does this mean that Gargoyle is going to be running an outdated version of the Tor package until the next firmware release, given that there were official updates of the Tor software project in the mean time?

Only Eric or developers can update TOR. This happens every so often.

https://accesslabs.org/wiki/TorWRT

From my understanding TOR developers update TOR code. The guys above adapt that code for OpenWRT/gargoyle and ERIC inserts it into gargoyle.