TP-Link WR841N v8 and LEDE/OpenWRT

I got a TP-Link WR841N v8 router for free this past weekend at HackLab TO's very entertaining Junk Independence Day (I'm not providing a link as I suspect it will break in days - use Google). The OpenWRT "Table of Hardware" ( https://openwrt.org/toh/start ) mentions v10 and v11 of this router. Since I already have v9 of this router, I know it works with OpenWRT Chaos Calmer, which is why I picked up this new (old) one. In doing a search on Google for "openwrt wr841n v8" to find installation instructions, I also found there's a OpenWRT page on this specific router: https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/tp-link/tp-link_tl-wr841n_v8 , which points to a LEDE firmware specific to the router. I had first tried renaming the v10 firmware to wr841nv8_tp_recovery.bin as suggested, but it still complained that the filename was incorrect. So I downloaded the v8 version of the firmware and renamed it the same thing and it ran perfectly happily.

  • Big warning at the top of the ToH: "Devices with ≤4MB flash and/or ≤32MB ram suffer from limitations in usability, extensibility and stability of operation." Is that why they don't list mine? When I bought the v9 it was listed.
  • the v10 and v11 have the same amount of memory and the same warning on their individual pages, and yet are listed in the ToH.
  • This is my first OpenWRT router with the LEDE firmware on it: this is newer than Chaos Calmer.