For some time, I'm (not quite happy) user of T-Com ADSL router. My particular one is Elcon 2253EU. But, on closer inspection, this device is more or less plain BCM96345 ADSL router. It does, however, have it share of problems: if you click enough on it's web interface, it will just die. While rest of router will work, I won't be able to access it over web, telnet or ftp any more. It sucks (did thay test is at all?)
So, I stared some googling, and found a lot of Broadcom development kits which where (more-or-less) just dropped by various manufacturers on the web (as a side-note, why doesn't Broadcom put those kits on his site and save us all so much trouble?).
I now have various versions (2.14, 2.18, 2.21, 3.02) and I will publish mirror of those images (because original site just disappeared last week) as soon as I sort through them.
With that out of the way, let me say that Broadcom is still GPL violator because they link non-free binary blobs directly in kernel. That's sad. Even worse, they are actually shipping huge parts of user land in binary only forms.
My idea is following: my ADSL modem has an USB port for which I don't have use (it's connected using ethernet). So, I would like to connect USB disk to it. For that, I would guess that I have to re-compile kernel (and since USB driver is binary junk, it might be hard or impossible) and connect disk to it (via USB 1.1, sic!). This will provide me with always-on disk storage on my network (or so I hope). Does this seem sane to you?
Also, did anybody managed to build ADSL images for 96345R target? Most of SDKs actually miss parts for this platform (although most of binary parts are same for all targets). I could build 96348R (which seems similar enough).
But, all this will have to wait few more days to get with a friend who has MAX232 to RS232 cable (for serial console, which should enable booting of new firmware image without flasing device) and JTAG cable (to extract exsiting firmware which, oh, joy, isn't available for download).
I'll keep you posted about progress (if any).