Data sheet collection

[Love4Boobies]

There are ways to make the content invisible to search engines. All you have to do is to make there are no direct HTTP/FTP links.

[xenos]

Actually I recently had a quite similar idea, although my idea was not focused on collecting data sheets, but rather on collecting any kind of information on embedded hardware, which would also include data sheets, of course. There is a huge number of embedded devices and consumer electronics products out there which are based on general purpose embedded CPUs or at least well known CPU architectures such as ARM or MIPS. For some of them the hardware is well documented by the manufacturer, for others it has been figured out via reverse engineering. Some of these products are natively running Linux (for example, TomTom navigation devices), others are at least capable of running Linux, and one may think of these devices as yet another playground for OS dev as well. So it would certainly be interesting to collect some information about such kind of devices.

Indeed I feel tempted to remove the initial idea of restricting this collection to embedded hardware. It is certainly desirable to collect information on chipsets, computer hardware and peripherals as well, especially among OS developers / driver developers (most notably the Linux community).

So far, my personal aim would to set up a wiki to collect information on things like:

• Which devices are out there?
• Which hardware is being used in these devices (CPU, memory, peripherals)?
• Which software do they use natively / can be run?
• How can one put new software on them?
• Where can one find information necessary for software development (documentation of hardware registers and so on), data sheets etc.?
• Which software has been ported so far and where is it available?

Of course I don't want to re-invent the wheel, so I would be happy if there was already such a collection. For example, there is www.opentom.org for information on TomTom navigation devices, there is www.elinux.org for embedded Linux devices (although the wiki looks like a pure mess to me), there is www.openembedded.org, there is www.h-node.com for Linux compatible hardware... But all of these cover only subsets of the more general idea stated above. So if anybody knows whether such a resource of project already exists and it might need some more contributors, please let me know.

I am not sure whether the OSDev wiki would be the best place for such a collection since the information is only partially related to OS development. Detailed hardware information about even exotic devices is one of the things an OS developer needs if he aims to deal with such hardware, and this information would also be useful for non OS developers such as driver developers from the Linux community.

So, if there is no such collection out there and OSDev is not the right place, the question remains, where such a collection could be hosted. Currently I don't have a server capable of doing this, so I am open for any suggestions. I was thinking whether there would be some support from the Linux community of the FSF for such a project.

Finally, let me add a brief note on my personal motivation for such a project. I have a TomTom navigation device natively running Linux and I already ported some different navigation software to that device. The hardware is quite well documented at www.opentom.org and it is based on a standard ARM CPU and peripherals. Recently I bought a satellite receiver natively running Linux and based on a Broadcom BCM74xx CPU (MIPS), but I could not find any information on this CPU (like hardware registers for the integrated peripherals).

Any opinions?

[xenos]

Indeed I found some information on the BCM43xx chipsets on the web: http://bcm-v4.sipsolutions.net/ and http://bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net/ The authors obtained this information by reverse engineering the drivers from Broadcom, so maybe at some point I might go a similar way in case there is no information publicly available... The official docs from Broadcom are accessible to registered customers only. For the BCM74xx I could only find a coarse overview schematic.

I already had a look at the drivers supplied with my satellite receiver (an ET9000 from Clarke-Tech) / with software images for this receiver. The USB drivers seem to be just some standard Linux drivers, only the DVB and video subsystems have a custom (apparently closed source) driver.

[cb88]

Data sheets are definitely a problem for more unusual systems as well such as Sparc.... they are just missing or never released. Or were hard copy only.

An example being the documentation for the macio and slavio (these are most of the onboard IO scsi serial etc...) chips as well as the leo framebuffer which interest me. I did acutally find some fragments of the leo documentation but its not nearly clomplete and all the graphs are missing :C

[Brynet-Inc]

Data sheets are definitely a problem for more unusual systems as well such as Sparc.... they are just missing or never released. Or were hard copy only.

An example being the documentation for the macio and slavio (these are most of the onboard IO scsi serial etc...) chips as well as the leo framebuffer which interest me. I did acutally find some fragments of the leo documentation but its not nearly clomplete and all the graphs are missing :C

Sun released a bunch of datasheets a few years back, but the links have been dead since Oracle takeover.

http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home

[cb88]

That wiki is full of broken links and I haven't found any mirrors. Also..alot of the stuff I wanted was still in queue to be released when Sun went supernova :C and turned into a black hole (Oracle)

[bluemoon]

Some of these products are natively running Linux (for example, TomTom navigation devices), others are at least capable of running Linux, and one may think of these devices as yet another playground for OS dev as well.

How about playing with an old router? There is linux and busy-box which you can flash into linksys routers so I think it's possible to "flash you own OS" into it, and the good thing it comes with network support :p

[xenos]

How about playing with an old router? There is linux and busy-box which you can flash into linksys routers so I think it's possible to "flash you own OS" into it, and the good thing it comes with network support :p

That's exactly what I was thinking about. All you need to know is some documentation about those routers (CPU, chipset...), which should not be too hard to find in this case since they are already running Linux.

[bluemoon]

You may want to checkout the dd-wrt project.

[Brynet-Inc]

I picked up a D-link DAP-1350 AP/router/client combo device so I could setup wireless, I never needed it before but it seems like within a year I had acquired two devices with wireless capabilities.

So when I started unpacking it I discovered a GPL notice, from there I found source tarballs on D-link's FTP servers.

It wasn't in really good shape, but it was mostly complete, at least enough to compile the kernel/userland and build a custom firmware image (..start telnetd in init scripts, dmesg binary).

The device can recover easily from a bad flash so it's pretty safe to flash custom firmware on the device, it took awhile but I finally managed to find the datasheet.. which makes it a suitable platform of OSDev.

Some guy in the Ukraine ported FreeBSD, due to device constraints it's a custom distribution (..zrouter) but he definitely managed to make the device more useful than the stock Linux firmware (..and openwrt/dd-wrt don't support it).

[Brynet-Inc]

Nice, from what I figured DAP-1350 uses Ralink RT3052F chipset, which includes MIPS24KEc 384MHz core in a nice package.

Indeed, the datasheet I found for the RT3050/RT3052 is RT3050_5x_V2.0_081408_0902.pdf.

One thing I forgot to mention is that it has a USB 2.0 OTG (host or device) controller, and my DAP-1350 includes a full size external port which means I could theoretically use a hub and connect a keyboard, perhaps even one of those USB display devices (..DisplayLink, etc).