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Development

The Source Code

The code is stored inside a git tree which contains all branches and releases.

All repositories can be browsed online through GitHub.

Most of the development happens in the lime-packages git repository which can be browsed on GitHub or downloaded using git:

git clone https://github.com/libremesh/lime-packages.git
cd lime-packages

Compiling LibreMesh from source code

This procedure has been tested on GNU/Linux, on other systems it could require some modifications or it can be run in a Linux virtual machine. Generally, the first compilation takes a few hours and requires at least 10 GB of disk space.

First of all you need to install a few packages to your system.
Building OpenWrt requires a bunch of installed software.

If you are unsure about your system having all the dependencies installed, you can just go on with the OpenWrt compilation (see below) and, if it fails, check out the error messages.

On an Ubuntu system, the following command will install the minimum compilation dependencies:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends git ca-certificates subversion wget make gcc g++ libncurses5-dev gawk unzip file patch python3-distutils python3-minimal python2-minimal libpython2-stdlib

For other Linux distributions the packets list could be slightly different, check out the OpenWrt build system installation page.

Then you need to get the OpenWrt source code.
Make sure to git clone the source code as normal user (i.e. do not use root): the compilation will refuse to run if the administrator user root is being used.

Download OpenWrt source code

LibreMesh can be built on top of various OpenWrt versions. We officially support the compilation with OpenWrt Old Stable (19.07.10) versions (LibreMesh still have to be adapted to work with the latest OpenWrt 21.02 version).

For compiling LibreMesh on top of the Old Stable version of OpenWrt:

git clone -b v19.07.10 --single-branch https://git.openwrt.org/openwrt/openwrt.git
Enter OpenWrt build root
cd openwrt
Take default OpenWrt repositories feeds
cp feeds.conf.default feeds.conf
And add LibreMesh repositories to the OpenWrt feeds
cat << EOF >> feeds.conf

src-git libremesh https://github.com/libremesh/lime-packages.git;v2020.4
src-git profiles https://github.com/libremesh/network-profiles.git
EOF

With the lines above, you will compile the LibreMesh 2020.4 release. This is indicated by the ;v2020.4 suffix. Without this suffix, the master branch would be used, but the master branch is not compatible with OpenWrt 19.07. Instead, it is being developed for supporting OpenWrt 22.03.

Update the packages from the feeds
scripts/feeds update -a
scripts/feeds install -a
Run the configuration menu
make menuconfig

Check out the target (e.g. ATH79), subtarget (e.g. generic) and profile (e.g. tl-wdr3600-v1) of your router on OpenWrt table of hardware.

Select the Target System, Subtarget and Target Profile accordingly.

Deselect erroneous feeds locations:

  • Image configuration → Separate feed repositories → Enable feed libremesh

  • Image configuration → Separate feed repositories → Enable feed profiles

Deselect problematic packages:

  • Base system → dnsmasq

  • Network → odhcpd-ipv6only

Optionally, deselect unused packages:
- Network → ppp

If you local community has a profile in the network-profiles repository, you can select it in:

  • LibreMesh → network-profile → profile-your_community-your_profile

Network profiles are the specific configuration from the communities, and are stored in this collective
repository, but they can also be kept locally, depending on how every community network manages itself. For more instructions on how to create a profile or how to use a local one, check out the network profiles page.

Select (press space until when an asterisk appears, like <*>) LibreMesh packages:

  • LibreMesh → Offline Documentation → lime-docs-minimal (LibreMesh minimal documentation)

  • LibreMesh → lime-app (LibreMeshApp)

  • LibreMesh → lime-hwd-openwrt-wan (Respect openwrt wan interface as default)

  • LibreMesh → lime-proto-anygw (LibreMesh anygw proto support)

  • LibreMesh → lime-proto-babeld (LibreMesh babeld proto support)

  • LibreMesh → lime-proto-batadv (LibreMesh batman-adv proto support)

  • LibreMesh → shared-state

    • shared-state-babeld_hosts (babeld-hosts module for shared-state)

    • shared-state-bat_hosts (bat-hosts module for shared-state)

    • shared-state-nodes_and_links (nodes_and_links module for shared-state)

  • Utilities → babeld-auto-gw-mode

  • Network → batctl-default (B.A.T.M.A.N. Advanced user space configuration tool)

If after the compilation you don’t see the compiled image in the bin/targets/…​/…​/ folder, it is possible that your router has such a small flash memory that the aforementioed packages don’t fit in it (it can happen with routers having 4 MB of flash memory, check this on the OpenWrt Table of Hardware, or when selecting huge packages to be included). In this case, you can remove the .config generated packages list and repeat the packages selection without including lime-app. If the compiled image is still too large, try selecting only lime-proto-anygw, lime-proto-batadv and lime-proto-babeld or following this guide.

Some more packages are recommended but not mandatory for a working LibreMesh network. Consider avoiding to select the following packages only if the created image is too large and does not fit in the router memory.

  • LibreMesh → check-date-http (Keep local date under NTP too far away skew)

  • LibreMesh → Offline Documentation → lime-docs (LibreMesh full documentation)

  • LibreMesh → lime-hwd-ground-routing (Manage 802.1q VLANs for ground routing)

  • LibreMesh → lime-debug (libremesh debug utils)

Additionally and optionally, httpS for the web interface can be enabled selecting (beware that the web interace will be shown as not trusted):

  • Utilities → Encryption → px5g-standalone

Finally, also the 802.11s mesh connections can be password protected, this will require a specific configuration and this package to be selected:

  • Network → wpad-mesh-openssl

and this to be de-selected:

  • Network → wpad-basic

Due to a known bug, can happen that wpad-mesh-openssl gets automatically deselected. Each time you use menuconfig, please check if wpad-mesh-openssl is still selected.

In order to have additional packages, the easiest way is to select them in menuconfig. More packages can be installed afterwards via opkg, but some of these require a specific kernel configuration to be in place. This can be achieved following these additional instructions dealing with kernel vermagic. Beware that this will increase noticeably the time and storage space required for the compilation.

Save and exit.

At this stage there is the possibility to include custom files in the compiled firmware image. For this, you will have to create, inside the openwrt/ directory, a files/ directory containing the directory structure and files you want to add. For example, if you want to have a /etc/config/lime-community file you need to do the following:

mkdir -p files/etc/config/
touch files/etc/config/lime-community

and then edit the newly created lime-community file including your custom content. If a file from a package has the same name and path as a file in this directory, it will be overwritten. This is a quick way to include a custom configuration file, without the need to create an online network profile.

Finally, compile the images
make -j$(nproc)

If everything goes well you should find the produced binaries inside the bin/ directory.

Emulating on your computer with qemu

Its possible to emulate a image compiled for x86_64 architecture. See script qemu_dev_start.sh and qemu_dev_stop.sh scripts.

You will be running something like:

sudo ./qemu_dev_start openwrt-x86-64-combined-ext4.img openwrt-x86-64-ramfs.bzImage

More information here

This script only works with Libremesh version 2020.4 Openwrt version 19.07.10.
See more here.

Submitting Patches

We accept pull requests via GitHub. But patches can also be submitted via the lime-dev mailing list.

The Web Presence

The pages you’re reading are generated from text files using the
AsciiDoc suite plus Jekyll.

Any changes made to the website repository will be reflected on our libremesh.org website.

In order to generate these pages locally:

git clone https://github.com/libremesh/libremesh.github.io.git
cd libremesh.github.io && bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

For more details, check the README on Github.

If you would like to contribute to the documentation then please send patches to our mailing list or open a pull request on GitHub. An easy way to edit and file a pull request is clicking the "Edit this page" button at the top right of each page.

Please use the AsciiDoc syntax for contributions on the web page.