[Ipodlinux-devel] new ipod, etc

[PALFFY D. <dp...@ra...>]

Hi,

It seems like the ipodlinux development has slowed down a bit last
months... I think it would be nice to accelerate it, since I'll reveive my
new g3 ipod this week.

I really want to get the kernel running on the new ipods and i will try to
do it to my best knowledge, but since I haven't done much low level kernel
programming, any help would be appreciated.

I think the first two steps would be to revive initrd support and to look
if one of the new remote pins was connected to a serial output (I can
easily imagine a bigger remote with an LCD display as a future accessory).

About the initrd part: Bern, do you have any of the early versions running
from initrd? The CVS tree at sourceforge doesn't seem to contain anything
except the stub in head-arm-ipod.S.

About the serial ports: What should I try to get some 01010101 out on the
serial port that I can look for with a scope? If I could boot to an initrd
it would be easy, but I haven't ever tried kernel space serial
programming... Or should I write a short assembly routine and boot to it
directly?

And some other thoughts:

The current code sets the processor speed to 75MHz, but, according to the
specs it should support 90. This increment should help somewhat in vorbis
and mp3 decoding.

Also, the 96Kb of on-chip SRAM could help. The current development of
tremor to support DSPs is trying to reduce memory footprint - so if we
could squeeze as much of the critical code into SRAM as possible might
help a lot, especially because the main memory seems slooowwww if it only
has a 16 bit bus. The slight overhead in CPU cycles should not matter,
someone on the tremor development list claimed that a 30-40 MHz ARM should
be able to decode vorbis if it had enough fast RAM. By the way, I couldn't
find much about the memory map of the iPods. Where is the SRAM memory
located?

Thanks in advance for any help.

PS: does anyone have the archives of the list in mailbox format? It would
be nice to be able to read it offline...

--
Dani
			...and Linux for all.