[Prism54-devel] Prism54 development update

[Sebastien]

> I do not fully understand this.
>
> Do you have unpacked fw image?

Yes, Jean Baptiste ran it in the Virtera emulator, and the firmware 
self-extracted in the (virtual) memory, which was then dumped to a file :)

> Do you have full disassembly of it?

Yes. And it's consistent :)

> Did you reach the stage where you can run GCC on disasmed source
> and obtain exactly same image?

This is not GCC, but GNU as.
We did not, because the syntax of the GNU disassembler is slightly different 
from the syntax of the GNU assembler. There may be some command-line option 
to fix this, though, but I haven't tried. Dead listing and trial and error 
from the FreeMAC/ISLMON prompt have been enough so far.

> Do you know how to convert uncompressed image back into compressed
> form so that it could be loaded into real hardware?

I think the best solution is to rewrite the bootstrapper from scratch.

> BTW hardware available to me is 2 PCI fullmac cards.

This should be okay :)
The NET2280-based design has a normal PCI bus ; the differences between the 
PCI and USB firmware come from the fact that the SoftMAC USB firmware 
rewrites NET2280 registers to optimize USB bandwidth by doing things (for 
instance, flushing endpoint FIFOs) from the PCI bus instead of from the USB 
bus. The DMA management in the firmware is also a bit different.
The UARTPCI protocol is exactly the same, so there should be no problem with 
obtaining the FreeMAC prompt on a PCI device with no changes (it's already 
working with the current stage of developement, and I can send binary and 
source snapshots to anyone interested). Only a host implementation should be 
required.