Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Fuloong liberated

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

On 17.05.2011 04:37, Karl Goetz wrote:
> On Mon, 16 May 2011 21:45:56 +0200
> Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> On 16.05.2011 11:12, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
>>> Hello all. As you all probably know the Floong as shipped by lemote
>>> uses a 64K binary blob to initialize the video which makes it
>>> non-free. Fortunately now there is an alternative: GRUB2. To
> Congrats on reaching the point of booting :)
>
Thanks but that point was reached some time ago. Just booting and
operation was blind (or serial only). Not really a full potential.
>>> The resulting grub.img can be flashed using flashrom
>>> http://flashrom.org/Flashrom. Be sure to have backup chip before
>>> flashing. Fortunately the chip is socketed so you can easily
>>> replace it. Although the image such created worked fine for me, it
>>> wasn't tested enough yet so have a backup chip and please, report
>>> if you encounter any problems.
> Does this mean its now eaiser to free the fuloong then yeeloong? (as
> iirc yeeloongs boot rom is soldered on?)
Yeeloong chip is soldered, except in dev models. While flashing is
equally easy on both of them (flashrom -w grub.img), recovery from a
failed flash on yeeloong isn't. Solution would be to distribute compiled
and checked versions of flash. It's somewhat "one size fits all"
compared to the customization possibilities of self-created GRUB but is
much safer. My proposition for precompiled ones to support msdos and
GPT, btrfs, xfs, ext*, fat, ufs2 and zfs (+ntfs if size permits, useful
for external drives), linux and kfreebsd, simultaneous console on local
(US keylayout) and serial , jpg for background, filled with other useful
modules up to 512K.  It would wait for 2 seconds for user to press ESC,
if he doesn't it loads the first ($part)/boot/grub/grub.cfg or
($part)/grub/grub.cfg it can find. I can post the configline for this
and/or compiled image but I'm not able to check it before June, 20 when
I'll be back in Europe. If someone can test it earlier we can distribute
it earlier.
OTOH Yeeloong liberation isn't done yet. The problem is EC. We have no
free EC firmware (it's on separate chip than normal firmware) available.
Reinder de Haan is working on it but it's a very difficult task.
> thanks,
> kk
>
>
>
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-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko

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