[E3-hacking] E2 hackery & coding

[Matt Evans]

Howdy DG, DM,


I am displaying an extraordinary lack of etiquette by replying to you  
both in one email.  Shock! :D  But it's lazy time so:

On 12 Nov 2008, at 20:26, David Given wrote:

> Matt Evans wrote:
> [...]
>> Never did get round to finishing the OS, or the uclinux port... (It's
>> too painful to keep downloading dev kernels at 11k/s, I embarked on
>> getting the e2-monitor to boot from MMC but that too got
>> sidetracked... :D )
>
> Before my e2 esploded I got the Prex boot loader up and running --- it
> would pull an ar file full of ELF files out of flash (using the PBL
> entry points, so it was compatible with PBL's NFTL system and you  
> could
> upload files with pblq), and link and relocate them into RAM. Of  
> course,
> since I never got as far as trying to run the kernel I don't know if
> it's doing it *right*, but the code might be useful to someone.

Yeah post it! :)  Prex sounds cool, get anywhere fun with it?  I got  
about 5 lines into uclinux booting and ... Well, it's covered in dust  
now. :-/

> BTW, if by MMC you mean SMC, then you should be aware that at least  
> some
> E2s (such as mine) don't have the card reader. There's a slot in the
> case and an unpopulated set of pads on the motherboard, but no socket.

By MMC, I mean an MMC card.  A bit like an SD card.  Or, an SD card in  
MMC mode.  :-)  (I was just bit-banging it from the smartcard  
header.)  I got fairly tired of the smartmedia cards & NAND in general  
& didn't finish convincing PBL to do more than fetch blocks from it  
(it wanted something else to select it as 'current FS' -- possible it  
plainly doesn't work, but the code appeared to support selection of  
either device).  (It may have missed initialisation & required some  
other tickle early on to look for the SM card.)


DaveMills,

The last link I posted was http://axio.ms/projects/e2/e2-monitor-0.25.tgz 
   but there appears to be an e2-monitor-0.26.tgz archive in that dir.  
too.  :-)  (I don't think I emailed about it but try the .26  
version.)  You'll need an ARM cross compiler (anything little-endian  
should do) to build it.  (There's an -mcpu=arm7tdmi in the Makefile  
that should force fancier compilers back into line.)

Any probs give me a shout!  It's not snazzy, will load a flat binary  
blob out of flash with a simple/funny header to a specified address --  
never got round to an ELF loader.


Cheers & happy hacking (& post what you get up to!),


Matt