[Prism54-users] Re: [Prism54-devel] Prism54 development update

[Denis Vlasenko]

On Wednesday 31 August 2005 23:51, Jean-Baptiste Note wrote:
> Dear list,
> 
> > That's pretty much my opinion, of course ; comments and criticism are welcome.
> 
> Just a comment, for the list (you pretty much know where i stand
> Sebastien !), about what i'm doing when i get time : we have a
> decompressed, disassembled firmware. Reading ASM is not fun, but ARM asm
> is doable; nothing like the x86 crap. So we pretty much can understand

<joke> GRRRR what did you just say? x86 asm crap? My religious feelings
just got insulted </joke>

Well, I'd say people tend to think that asm dialect which they learned first
is neat and easy to understand, and all other CPUs are hair-raising
crawling horrors. It's not true in reality, but I (an x86 asm guy)
do read ia64/sparc/whatever asm from kernel source when there aren't
any good scary movies on TV. It looks impossible to understand.

My favorites are memcpy routines.

> what happens inside the firmware when sending it some packets; I tend to
> think that this is the only way we can understand how to talk to the
> internal peripherals.
> 
> As a proof-of-concept, i've somewhat commented the code of the
> uncompressed and disassembled firmware. Two days of work yielded the DMA
> tx and rx interface (put to good use in freemac), the internal eeprom
> interface (i2c bus through GPIO registers) and the start of the frame
> decoding functions (which are to be followed through to understand how
> to communicate properly with the softmac firmware, as well as how to
> control the radio and such).
> 
> results to be found in raw mode at :
> http://jbnote.free.fr/islsm/doku.php?id=re:disassembly_2_4_3_4
> 
> There's much to be done, and low-hanging fruits to reap...
> 
> Everyone's invited !

/me start firefox
--
vda