Saturday 27 July 2013

mini210S updates



Yet again it's been a while since my last post but things are moving forwards with the nand driver, there is currently an effort from some of the chinese developers on the arm9home.net forums to do various ports  for the tiny/mini210s, barebox, uboot and a kernel upgrade to 3.10, I've been helping to iron out issues with the nand driver port and this evening we got a working 3.10 nand driver, it's currently spitting out ecc errors but hey, don't they all?

All joking aside that is actually a reasonable state for the driver to be in, at that point the code has managed to query the nand chip and retrieve the ID bytes directly from it, so we know the read/write functions are working.

We also know at this point that we're hitting the correct register addresses because the functions are working and we're pulling in meaningful information, it was broken but we found that the nand_flash_dev struct had been altered so simply changing where we pull the current device id from fixed that.  As long as nothing else has changed in a big way in the nand driver then it's more than likely a mismatch between the version of superboot and our nand driver, more specifically it's probably the nand ecc pos layout that is at fault.

There was a pull request on github for the nand driver, there was a 'typo' in the ecc pos layout, which in fairness wasn't our error, we used a specific driver to dump information from to write our driver, the values for the ecc pos layout were a direct dump, which probably explains why our driver only ever worked with a specific version of superboot.  The next step is to dump information from the nand drivers from the newer dvds, if we use the kernel sources and matching superboot we can see if the 'typo' error is isolated or not.



2 comments:

  1. Hi Reggie,

    can you share any of the porting efforts being done by the chinese developers, maybe even a link to the forum would do.

    thank you

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    1. Hi, sorry I didn't spot this post earlier, you should be able to find the 210 updates on www.arm9home.net it's FA's chinese website, you'll need a translation app. and a baidu cloud account.

      www.andahammer.com are in the processes of finding a decent western host so that we don't have to jump through these hoops anymore.

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