X-micro assembles and packages all kinds of devices including 'wireless broadband routers', one of which is the WXL-11GRIX.
Opening up the device tells us that this is in fact a SD9218 CPU (MIPS R3000 clone with integrated networking and peripheral hardware controllers) with a few extra components. This makes one wonder what operating system this device is running...

First of all a picture of what is in there.

An overview of the systemboard, antenna is at the right bottom

Clearly visible are the 'system on a chip' SD9218, the leds, ethernet connectors, a mPCI card (for the wireless connection), 3 other chips and a whole bunch of capacitors.

Less clear is the pin header at the left (4 pins), anyone any idea what this might be? (my guess would be a serial port for debugging/console access, but with 4 pins?)

To me it looks pretty much like a reference board but the wireless card is something other then the offering from SD..The card used in the X-micro wireless router supports a 2nd antenna but the devvice doesn't come with one. The connector is there however.

The SD9218 is a MIPS R3000 compatible CPU with several peripheral controllers on chip, and as can be seen, allows one to build a switch + router with very little extra hardware.

Looking around for what this thing might run turns up this 'board support package' from Linpus, which is based on embedded Linux.

Alternatively, X-micro could be using a system called eCos which is also supported on the SD9218.

This looks hopefull for the hacker, it might just be running Linux, and if not then it might be possible to install a Linux on it still.

But first of all, what would X-micro be running on this thing.

Getting a flash image from X-micro and doing a strings on the image file turns up the string Linux quite a few times. It also turns up the string RtosTxImage.

The first part of the file looks like some header for the image file itself and a kernel possibly. After that follows a gzip compressed file, which looks like a filesystem image, possibly a jffs2 image.

So what we seem to have here is an embedded system with a mips r3000 cpu, some memory, 2mb of flash memory (from the size of what looks to be a kernel and filesysten unage), 2 network interfaces, switching hardware and a mini PCI based wireless card, capable of, and most likely running linux.

It might just be a system based on the Linpus BSP for the SD9218 on some SD9218 reference board. It seems to be running Linux, and since that means X-micro is distributing Linux binaries, I'd like to see the source of those.

It seems like a rather interesting device to play with also.

A similar device was described by Chris Bainbridge. The firmware is not identical, but also uses this RtosTxImage format and has a very similar layout. I wonder what is in the device he describes.

(edit by Bart) more information about this device as provided by readers