ipodlinux-devel

[Ipodlinux-devel] ipod debug interface

[Marcel L. <ml...@ds...>]

I dumped the system partition of my ipod and did a 
"strings fw_ipod | less" which gave me some interesting results.

Doesn't anyone expect that the original firmware don't use some form of
a very basic debug interface ? I saw some XMODEM strings and others.

I could imagine that at least two of the pins on the bottom connector
can be for a serial line ?

Are all pins of the connector known yet ?

Marcel

-- 
Marcel Lanz
http://www.ds9.ch/lanz/
mar...@ds... | mar...@n-...
GnuPG: F975 C6F7 04C8 642B 6DF4  4DF4 2945 F02A 797E 7DAB

Re: [Ipodlinux-devel] ipod debug interface

[Bernard L. <le...@bo...>]

Hi Marcel,

The XMODEM stuff has been there since the very early firmware and it
looks like its part of some serial debug interface.  In the diagnostic
firmware there are reads and writes to a serial device but there is no
access to the actual pins on the older iPods.  The boot loader also
seems to use the same serial interface (and actually provides quite a
bit of functionality via it).

Its possible that there is a serial out pin on the G3 iPods (g1 and g2
have serial input via the headphone jack for the remote control) but its
unlikely that they can access this debug functionality.

cheers,
bern.

On Wed, 2003-12-24 at 05:16, Marcel Lanz wrote: 
> I dumped the system partition of my ipod and did a 
> "strings fw_ipod | less" which gave me some interesting results.
> 
> Doesn't anyone expect that the original firmware don't use some form of
> a very basic debug interface ? I saw some XMODEM strings and others.
> 
> I could imagine that at least two of the pins on the bottom connector
> can be for a serial line ?
> 
> Are all pins of the connector known yet ?
> 
> Marcel

Re: [Ipodlinux-devel] ipod debug interface

[Jim W. <js...@bl...>]

> looks like its part of some serial debug interface.  In the diagnostic
> firmware there are reads and writes to a serial device but there is no
> access to the actual pins on the older iPods.  The boot loader also

   Has anyone made any progress on downloading and decompiling (to 
assembly) the iPod firmware code?  True, we don't have symbol 
information for the images (and won't, unless they release DDKs for the 
iPod at some point).  I'm wondering if there's anything in there that 
looks like the ARM RDI (remote debugging interface), or maybe even (if 
we're very, VERY lucky, which is very unlikely) something that looks 
like the old Hammer protocol used on Newton (protocol is being 
deciphered by Fillip Zawadiak, poke around at 
http://philz.freezope.org/newton).

Jim Witte
js...@bl...
Indiana University CS