[olug] OT: annoying bios!

[T. J. Brumfield]

Off-topic, but if anyone here is capable of writing device drivers,
can someone eventually look at the Linux device drivers for Sony
Memory Stick Duo's?

Someone started on drivers, which Ubuntu patches into their kernel,
but they don't work very well, and they aren't in the mainline kernel.
 the Sony Memory Stick Duo is the primary means of getting files on a
PSP.  It would be really nice to get these working!

Thanks!

-- T. J.

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Will Langford <unfies at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's no solution to this, just a random ranting.  Might prove to be an
> interesting read.
>
> So... where I work, we toil with embedded systems all day.  I've written
> most of the drivers, API's, etc that are used on these systems.  They're
> Geode-233/266mhz systems with between 16 and 256MB of RAM and either compact
> flash or disk on chip storage.  There's also a slew of uarts, gpio lines,
> non volatile ram, etc etc etc.
> We've been working on this same cpu/chipset combination for probably around
> 9 years or so... damn did this platform have a pair of legs.  While not
> overly useful as a desktop, it's been great for what we've needed.  Three
> years ago we started doing ethernet networking with them.  And that's been
> pretty straight forward as well.  About 2.5 years ago the system builder and
> I started using PXE heavily for the non-embedded board stuff.... servers
> we'd put in the field, workstations in house... etc.  Bios updates,
> ghosting, that kind of thing.
>
> In the back of our heads was the fact that one day we'd wanna attempt PXE
> booting the embedded board (we install upwards of hundreds of these on
> location with each server) in an attempt to solve some problems, etc.
>  *Always* wanted to to do this since we started PXE'ing in house stuff.
>  Long ago, I grabbed an etherboot boot floppy and PXE'd off that.. worked
> like a charm.
>
> Eyeballing our BIOS, I couldn't find any free space to attempt to stick an
> expansion ROM into it to fire up PXE-from-BIOS.  And that was that.
>
> Lately, I've been building isolated vmware systems for the express purpose
> of an isolated clean build environment.  This way development tools don't
> collide, etc.  We have our BIOS source, but it's 199x based stuff.  Wants
> dos/win95 with borland c++ / tasm or msc / masm (not msvc, msc!).  So... I
> get the vmware session up and start fiddling with the BIOS source.
>
> VIOLA! I can build our BIOS.  Prior to this, it was a matter of fighting
> with the boss who had the master BIOS source buried on some legacy machine
> etc etc etc.  It's basically the last bastion of source I didn't have access
> to.
>
> I shrink the amount of space used by our BIOS by half.  I grab realtek's
> RPL/pxe code binary for throwing into BIOS/bios-extension-rom's... use a
> linux box to concatenate the final BIOS image together and burn it to an
> eeprom.  Fire it up and:
>
> PXE-E06 - DDIM required
>
> :(.  Look it up, it's apparently an extension to the PNP sec.  Something
> about shadowing the extension to ram, setting it's area read/write, running
> it, then setting it back to readonly or freeing some shit up.  I try
> altering the extension scan/execute loop in the BIOS to clear the read only
> flags in BIOS shadow stuff... but... still no luck :(.  Etherboot's no
> better.
>
> A quick grep of our BIOS source shows NO mention of PNP anywhere.
>
> DAMNITALLTOHELL!
>
> 3 years of desperately wanting to do this ... finally getting the ability to
> build the BIOS from source... and I get cockblocked from an outdated BIOS
> :(.  There is a very slight chance that I'll be able to take the expansion
> scan/execute loop ... and have it manually shadow the ROM to RAM -- just to
> make sure the scan/execute isn't working over ROM instead of shadow'd areas
> (which the BIOS does support shadowing, and yes, was told to do so).  Given
> the entire lack of PNP -- I imagine this isn't going to help :(.  Lastly,
> our BIOS supports booting from a DOS ROM disk... which I've got 32K of space
> in the BIOS that I *might* be able to squeeze something into.
>
> Lastly, our boards do support booting from a 512K eeprom (see the 32k thing
> above) -- but I was really wanting to take every extra piece of hardware out
> of the picture :(.
>
> MOFO!
>
> Dream crushed ruthless in its entirety -- unless I manage to dig up a
> realtek PXE BIOS extension that isn't PNP based :(
>
> -Will
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