[Prism54-devel] Prism54 development update

[Denis Vlasenko]

On Sunday 11 September 2005 15:45, Jean-Baptiste Note wrote:
> I'd add that i wouldn't be in favor of recompiling/modifying/recompiling
> the asm we have as you suggested earlier. 
> 
> This would clearly breach even sensible copyright laws. Here in France i
> have the right to reverse-engeneer their code, but I have no right to
> modify it and redistribute it.

I plan to modify it and NOT redistribute, but run modified fw
to better understand what it does.

And btw, maybe I'm stupid, but where is that dump of unpacked fw?
Don't see it at http://jbnote.free.fr/islsm/doku.php.
(PCI fullmac and/or softmac would be useful to me)

> > What toolchain do I need to build? Gcc? binutils? What versions of those
> > known to work? What patches to apply, if any?
> 
> This information is on the wiki, along with a nice script which will do
> most of the work for you.

Downloading, thanks!
 
> > Examples/HOWTOs how to get firmware to load in real or emulated hardware?
> 
> This is simple enough. You load freemac as you would another firmware.

Do you mean I load prism54 driver and just replace my old fullmac fw image
by freemac?! I think that wouldn't work and you don't mean this.
Then how?

And where is freemac source or image?

Can you document it better at http://jbnote.free.fr/islsm/doku.php?

> > What is that FreeMAC/ISLMON? Can I load it into fullmac?
> 
> Freemac is the firmware's reimplementation. ISLMON is the userland
> utility used to 

From what I see in Makefile, islmon is not a i386 userspace:

AS=arm-elf-as
CC=arm-elf-gcc
OBJCOPY=arm-elf-objcopy
CFLAGS=-O2 -g -mcpu=arm9

all: monitor.arm

monitor.arm: boot.s $(OBJECTS)
        $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -nostartfiles -s -o monitor.elf boot.s $(OBJECTS)
        $(OBJCOPY) -O binary monitor.elf monitor.arm

.c.o: isl38xx.h
        $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $< -c -o $@

There is no README. Ok, I will build it, but
I do not understand what shall I do when I will build it.
I'll get monitor.arm, and what next?

> > If not, where should I start to fix that?
> 
> On linux, you need to 
> 
> 1/ implement the driver layer needed to talk to the firmware (that's the
> UARTPCI protocol) into the linux driver. Coordinate with me on this, as
> i may be working on it as soon as today :)
> 
> 2/ port the userspace utility ISLMON, which is not really required to
> play once 1/ above is done correctly.
> 
> > IOW, I need something like http://www.uclinux.org/pub/uClinux/utilities/armulator/,
> > but s/ucLinux/prism54/
> 
> I don't understand IOW (!) but you don't need anything like armulator to
> do this. Emulation has been usefull to uncompress the firmware. It may
> be usefull after in order to observe how the firmware acts/reacts
> (seeing the code run instead of only reading it), but this is still
> another step.

IOW = in other words.

I meant that I would like to have a page similar to that ucLinux page
which helps people to start hacking on free firmware.

http://jbnote.free.fr/islsm/doku.php is a bit disorganized in this respect...
--
vda