From: Jens Arnold <arnold-j_at_t-online.de>
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 02:09:43 +0200

Hello [IDC]Dragon

On 10.08.2005, you wrote:

>> Does bootbox work yet?

> Yes, it works, but I'd like to gain a bit more confidence with
> it. Only a few people participated in the beta test, iirc not
> all all models were covered (Studio and Ondio SP untested).

Pls remember that I tested on all my devices, among which are
both an Ondio SP and a Studio 10...

> One issue is the start address of the new Rombox. Now it needs
> to be behind bootloader plus bootbox, before it was behind
> bootloader plus Archos. This is how we gain more space,
> Bootbox being smaller. This address is aligned to the next 4
> KB (a flash sector). It varies per model and restricts us in
> future Bootbox updates, if any. If e.g. Bootbox grows into the
> next 4KB, we'd have to adapt the Rombox build.

We could round up here. Afair, the bootloader determines the
start of the second image from the start & length of the first
one. Simply padding the first image a little with zero bytes to
leave a bit more room should be enough. This would also have the
advantage that we could use the same start address for the
second image on all models.

> I have a hen-and-egg problem with releasing it, because I
> prefer to have it built with a known defined code base of
> Rockbox, let's say v2.5. Then we need to build Rombox with a
> new start address. But you want this change in v2.5, too, to
> have Rombox working within the release...

> Any ideas?

I'd say releasing it in parallel would be a good idea. The
feature freeze phase should help weeding out bugs.

Of course rockbox_flash should get the start address check
added we already talked about. It will work fine as long as we
don't change the linking convention, i.e. the startup code is
located directly behind the vector table. Adding this check can
happen before the freeze. This will prevent flashing a rombox
image with the wrong start address. Of course it won't do this
if someone tries to flash with an old rockbox_flash, but I
don't see what we could do about that, and it's not too
dangerous either because of the backup image.

Release 2.5 rombox should then be built with the new rom_start
address. Bootbox for the flash packages would be built from the
same code base. Immediately after that the flash packages could
be put together, tested & released.

Regards, Jens

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Received on 2005-08-11