v2.8.8 — The Traffic Analyzer's live view unfreezes
One fix, found in the field the night v2.8.6 first ran and confirmed on hardware the next
morning. Nothing else changes.
- The Traffic Analyzer's live metrics froze and lurched; now they flow again. A protection
added in the recent security hardening — a time limit around the small helper programs the
traffic collector runs, so a hung helper could not stall it forever — had a flaw in its plumbing:
the watchdog it set up held the collector's data pipe open until the time limit expired, even
when the helper had already answered. Every reading that should have taken milliseconds took the
full three seconds, and with hardware QoS enabled the collector spent roughly 27 seconds blocked
out of every pass. On the page that looked like charts flatlining, then jumping forward every
20–30 seconds. The watchdog now stands aside from the data pipe; it still cuts off a genuinely
hung helper at the same deadline. Verified on the router itself: the live feed updates every
second again, and a deliberately hung helper is still killed on time. History totals were never
affected — only the live view was degraded, and no data was lost.
Images & checksums (RT-BE86U)
Two flashable images: + AI Advisor (default) and Standard (noMCP, all AI components compiled out entirely). Flash the *_nand_squashfs.pkgtb via Administration > Firmware Upgrade.
| Variant | File | SHA-256 |
|---|---|---|
| + AI Advisor | RT-BE86U_3006_102.8_Reaper_v2.8.8_nand_squashfs.pkgtb
| 52762b9affa700a029b7bf46f0e066ad1301c8efebd83e991a8188cc05bcc4bb
|
| Standard | RT-BE86U_3006_102.8_Reaper_v2.8.8_noMCP_nand_squashfs.pkgtb
| aa713aec1d23706daaaf74668c6c3ce959e709c1f18e2c78abb6121254dc3d8e
|
Verify a download against the attached SHA256SUMS-RT-BE86U-Reaper_v2.8.8.txt.
Corresponding source & reproducibility
The RT-BE86U image for v2.8.8 is built from this repository at tag v2.8.8-RT-BE86U: the pinned Asuswrt-Merlin base (3006.102.8-beta2, a7ebfa133a) plus the complete patch series. The tag freezes the exact source that produced it.
- Patches:
patches/(0001-0563) - Provenance record:
provenance/manifest.json - Source tree hash (
release/src/router):8a98666520c70ed390b475d9a05d68ce4dd8f757-- reproduce bygit am --keep-crof the patches onto the base, thengit rev-parse HEAD:release/src/router. - How to verify:
docs/REPRODUCIBILITY.mdanddocs/SOURCE-AVAILABILITY.md
The auto-attached Source code (zip/tar.gz) asset below is this repository at tag v2.8.8-RT-BE86U (patches + docs).