[E3-hacking] Nearly there

[Matt Evans]

Hola David,

Well done again :)

I've got a ton of space on my webserver so if you want me to put pblq 
up there then email it to me.

Perhaps we should start work on a 2ndstage loader?  Something simple, a 
bit like bootldr (well, more simple) or YAMON etc.

(i.e. switch on & it loads our loader (could easily fit into the first 
couple of K of NAND); this gives a friendly banner & shell, and allows 
something quick like ZMODEM download to DRAM (and then a 'program NAND 
from DRAM addresses X->Y')?  Also a default action that'll load a 
kernel from NAND to DRAM then jump would be lovely, too.  What do ppl 
think about this sort of thing?  It would make the old "download a 
kernel, boot, see what happens" development cycle much much faster than 
including a program-to-flash step.)

> It turns out that PBL *does* check the checksum of the boot chunk after
> all (I'd mistaken a bne for a beq), and doing the maths to find out the
> magic value to force the checksum to be zero is... slightly more 
> complex
> than I thought! When I'm less tired I'll try and do it properly, but 
> for
> now I'm brute-forcing it. As a result, PBL now sees my image as being
> valid and tries to run it... and falls over:
>
> PBL V3.1 Build:1277
> PBL Exception at PC=EAFFFFFAh CPSR=600000D7h(Abort) SPSR=600000D3h(SVC)
>  R0=00040074h  R1=00410090h  R2=00040090h  R3=FFFFFFFFh
>  R4=00550000h  R5=00410000h  R6=00030000h  R7=00040000h
>  R8=FFFF4C00h  R9=000141CCh R10=00000000h R11=FFFF4000h
> R12=00000000h
>
> That program counter looks awfully strange.

Could this be it copying your image to DRAM, then querying it to find 
out its start address, then jumping there?  The PC value there would 
cause the abort exception of course...  Do you know where it gleans the 
entry address from?  (And to where in DRAM it loads the chunk from 
NAND?)

Anyhow, well done!  I should have some hacking time this week, also 
hope to get JTAG going to have a play.  I think a bootloader would be 
useful for further tinkering/dev so will make a start on one.


Cheers,



Matt