My place to share some bits and bytes

Today number 06/06 from my german Linux-Magazin abo arrived. My first article about my A780 inside.
The first part of the article is written as a test. Tells about good and bad things of the standard software. The second part gives an introduction of more technical stuff like getting root and which linux software is working so far. A more in deep technical article will follow in number 08/06 hopefully. Thanks goes to Mirko Doelle from the Linux-Magazin editorial office. He helped me a lot, and also write some of the text, in the first part of the article.
And of course there is some kind of errata. In the last but one clause is written that Harald Welte programmed his own bootloader for the phone. Correct it should mean he has written boot_usb an program to communicate with the bootloader.
Read it enjoy it and if you have suggestistions just drop me a mail.

Within the last days we made two interesting steps forward.

On the one hand i was able to build a blob from the source delivered from Motorola. That's fine, but of course i don't want to test this code by flashing it over the working bootloader on my phone. We will try a method called reblob. Download the new blob down to the ram and JUMP to this address. Unfortunately i get it not to work until now. neither KERNEL_RAM_BASE nor BLOB_RAM_BASE work. I also tried blob, blob-chain, blob-rest, blob-rest-elf32, blob-start-elf32, blob-start, blob-chain-start and blob-start-chain-elf32 on both addresses. So i tried to get in contact with the blob developers. The summary: Maillinglist is broken, ml archiv is broken, irc channel seems dead and anon cvs is broken, too. Only Tim Riker, seems to be within the blob devel team, suggest some interesting points onto #openezx. I'am sure we get this running one day. But this would take some time which is a pity.

From the kernel hacking front is to tell that Harald was able to build and load a working 2.6.16.5 kernel. He's working on USB Device Controller and SD/MMC support. So hopefully we are able to boot kernel 2.6 and have a wroking initrd setup soon. I've ordered a 512MB MicroSD card today. :) I think you can read some more stuff about the 2.6 port in Haralds blog soon. Just follow planet openezx.

Two days ago i talked about it. Don't use a day-by-day used phone for devel purpose.

Mentioned by Harald we could only flash up to 1MB code into the bootloader ram with boot_usb. The standard kernel have a size about 876Kbyte. I was thinking about getting a smaller kernel to make room for an initrd inside the 1MB limit.

To get a small kernel we need to remove all the unnecessary things from our kernel config. So removing kernel module support, a lot of the fs support, camera driver and some more stuff would be a good idea. After some try and error i had a compiled kernel with a size from 660Kbyte. Booting this kernels seems to work except of the normal crash after some seconds. Some time later i would like to use my phone for normal purpose and switched it on again. After startup i noticed that my wallpaper was away and i take a look why. After diiging i've found that all my stuff stored on /diska was deleted except the standard folders like MyImages.

The standard folders seems to be restored after bootup in userspace if they are not already there. I'am not sure what was the root of the problem but i guess removing kernel module support or cromfs support had caused this damage. Fortunately the importantly data like phone numbers and dates are survived this accident. So i have to think about a backup solution. On the other hand restoring my private data once a day is also no good solution.

See the kernel messages on bootup is really usefull for debuggig purpose. After i good tip from Aleksei Timofeyev i need to research myself. Motorola resized the normal tux logo up to 320x240 to overlap the messages. Revert this changes gives me the kernel messages back. I've prepared a little patch.
The other thing happend in the openezx world yesterday was some talk about the flags displayed inside the bootloader. Harald Welte had some problems booting kernels and he discovered that his booloader shows other flags then mine. I start a wiki page about this stuff.
Doing all this kernel and bootloader stuff get me worried about the phone itself. It's my normal mobilphone i use every day for communication. Especially the last days nobody was able to reached me on my mobile for hours because the phone was in bootloader mode or booting kernels. ;) This is not a good solution. But buying a devel phone is not as easy as i'am a student and have to care about my money. If you like to sponsor me a phone for ezx development just cantact me. ;)

Yesterday i upgraded my weblog to a recent nanoblogger version. You can now use speial category feeds only if you want. The openezx category feed is now used in openezx planet. After upgrade i had to fix the END tags by hand. They changed form ----- to END-----.

Today i was working on some of my ezx stuff like scummvm and supertux ports. But nothing seems to work. So i decided to give the kernel stuff another try. Harald Welte wrote a userspace tool to load the kernel into ram via usb and blob bootloader. But he was not able to boot a kernel.

I take the first release from Motorola and try to compile it. But it fails. After some digging i found the patch from pnail again and after looking into it i did know that there was a include necessary. I don't need another piece of pnail's patch, only the missed include. You can find my small patch here

So the kernel boots, but there are problems and he crashes after ~10 seconds. You can find some more information in my posting at openezx-devel.