[E3-hacking] PBL and flash access on the E3

David Given dg at cowlark.com
Tue Mar 28 23:37:23 BST 2006


Hurrah! I have my shiny new E3 up and running, and am getting pblq back up
to speed.

It would appear that the reason pblq doesn't work on the E3 is primarily
due to the NOP packet not working (it appears to cause pbl to hit an
assertion and go into an infinite loop). There are also a few other gotchas
that cause the handshaking procedure to go wrong. I've fixed these, mostly
by copying the relevant bits of logic from pbltool --- ta.

Next thing is to try and get the flash code up and running; but I'm a
little hesitant to play because I don't want to overwrite anything crucial
and brick the device. *Is* there anything crucial in the NAND flash? I
notice that the MTD partition table has a chunk marked 'Amstrad Block'.
Does it matter if I overwrite this? Plus, am I right in that the e3's NAND
flash pseudoaddress is 0x400000, instead of the e2's 0x8001000?

I've also got Jonathon's prebuilt kernel running, which appears to work
nicely --- at least, it produces a palette-mangled penguin and vast numbers
of error messages (in pink) as the JFFS driver fails miserably to find a
JFFS filesystem on the flash. I need to try a filesystem on a compact flash
device and see if that works. But it's definitely getting somewhere!

-- 
+- David Given --McQ-+ "If you're up against someone more intelligent
|  dg at cowlark.com    | than you are, do something insane and let him think
| (dg at tao-group.com) | himself to death." --- Pyanfar Chanur
+- www.cowlark.com --+



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