Buffalo SkyStation CWR-GN150S Teardown

Walking last few hours thru Hong Kong streets and molls during last visit, I was looking for some impulsive shopping, and bought micro-router having following labels: Buffalo SkyStation CWR-GN150S, Hornington NE-GN150S, etc. What lured me was its really small size (5.5x4.5x1.7cm) and 2 Ethernet ports. It was also couple of bucks cheaper than TL-WR703N. I was thinking where's the catch, and later got it - it doesn't have USB host port (micro USB it has is only for power).

All manual for the router is in Japanese/Chinese, same for firmware, no English firmware on Internets, actually, barely any English pages at all. Teardown was even more disappointing: it has only 16MB of RAM (bye, OpenWRT), and turned out it uses RTL8196C SoC, infamous for being of MIPS-Lexra architecture, which is MIPS subarch crippled due to patent trolling between MIPS vendors. There's barely any support for this subarch from gcc and OpenSource projects, I found just one brave guy who tries to change the situation:

• http://ncrmnt.org/wp/2011/08/30/rtl8196-vs-openwrt-2/
• https://github.com/nekromant/linux-rlx-upstream

 Well, I added hacking on all this stuff to my (very long) queue. In the meantime, just posting this to let other folks to google it up.