[olug] OT: annoying bios!

Mon Sep 22 15:32:03 UTC 2008

I've been copying files to/from PSP's without issues for a long  
time(my 4-year old twins watch movies on them). Either mounting the  
PSP via USB cable or using a Duo->USB adapter.

What kernel version are you using?

Will, sorry about the bios woes......

-- 
Jay Swackhamer
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Quoting "T. J. Brumfield" <enderandrew at gmail.com>:

> 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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