Programmers' Hardware Database

[Nable]

Actually these are also nice for running Navit
http://wiki.navit-project.org/index.php ... evelopment
But of course also nice for OSDev

Oh, I'm using Ångström on h2200 but I didn't hear about Navit (or just didn't search enough), thank you, it seems to be very useful for me!
But (i may be doing smth wrong) GUI on this PDA works very sloooow under Linux (especially compared to native windows installation); menu and terminal are usable but some ~heavy apps like epdfview and FBReader are almost completely unusable. I'm planning to try something like GRX Lib or MGRX for GUI (I even think about using it w/o X11, writing apps for it then, who knows, may be even optimized lightweight OS).

[xenos]

Thanks to Nable the Programmers' Hardware Database is now hosted here:

http://mipt.cc:8080/index.php?title=Main_Page

[rdos]

Most entries seems to be empty.

Why not download some easily accessible specifications like Intel and AMD processor manuals, RealTek network controller specifications (while they still are on Google, as RealTek has changed their policies), AHCI specification and alike?

[Nable]

+1 to idea of saving datasheets before vendors hide them. Some time before i've never thought about that and didn't care much about storing local copies of datasheets (as it's not an easy task to maintain own archive in searchable state) but now I understand that this may be an important thing.

[rdos]

I have a load of specification, some of which were chance finds with Google. I can email them (anonymously) to anybody that want to archive them for the purpose of retaining them for OS developers. It is essential that such archive is kept with offline copies if somebody decides to close it down.

[xenos]

Indeed, there is not that much information in the database (yet), mostly because I am the only (recent) contributor. There are a few contributions by other people, too. My focus has been mostly on information that I needed myself, or that I just stumbled across - mainly devices and SoCs for which there is no publicly available information at all. Some of this stuff can be obtained from reverse engineering, other from leaked documentation.

I agree that keeping offline copies of documentation is a good idea. Actually this is something I've been doing just for myself already for years, since it was a necessity, living in a place with only a slow dial-up connection. But making them available to other people as well may be useful.

So if you would like to contribute something, you can request an account here Or if you would like to contribute something by mail, I'll send you a PM.

[~]

I have a load of specification, some of which were chance finds with Google. I can email them (anonymously) to anybody that want to archive them for the purpose of retaining them for OS developers. It is essential that such archive is kept with offline copies if somebody decides to close it down.

Please email them to me. I will send you a private message.

[xenos]

Now the Programmers' Hardware Database finally has it's own subdomain on the new server. You can find it here:

http://hwdb.mipt.cc/Main_Page

[merkin]

working great! nice job.

[xenos]

Thanks! I should mention that Nable donated the server and did most of the technical work

[toysoft]

Hello !

I am searching for the JTAG too, BCM97405, someone has it ?

Thank you !

TS

Sometimes even bad news have their good sides. My satellite receiver (Clarke-Tech ET9000, some Linux box) is broken and I need to return it to customer support. A bit of digging (it has a serial output for early boot messages) showed that the OS flash memory is broken (even though I haven't done anything) and needs to be replaced. The bootloader is in a separate flash, so that one still works. I'll send the box to customer support tomorrow.

But since I was already logged into the boot console, I thought I'd use the opportunity and play around a little. It turned out that the bootloader is based on Broadcom's Common Firmware Environment (CFE) and features a simple command line interface. The commands include some diagnostic stuff, memory dumps, directory listing of a USB stick, flashing images from TFTP or USB stick, loading files into memory and even booting some kernel (in ELF or raw binary format, uncompressed or gzip compressed) from USB, TFTP or flash. I wrote a very simple "Hello world!" assembly kernel printing some message to serial and managed to boot it from USB. It's quite some fun to play with this device, dig into MIPS assembly and figure out how things work.

I think I should write some wiki article here at OSDev including my "Hello world!" kernel, just in case...

Here's some hardware info on this device, including the boot process, which I just figured out today:
http://hardware.wikinet.org/wiki/ET9000
http://hardware.wikinet.org/wiki/BCM7405

BTW, the articles on BCM7405 and BCM2835 in my wiki are exceptionally popular - searching Google for those two ICs returns my wiki articles on the first few pages...

[xenos]

The pages you have linked to are now here:

http://hwdb.mipt.cc/ET9000
http://hwdb.mipt.cc/BCM7405

[xenos]

After not being active in this project for the last 2 years, I felt like I should set it up again and put the old content to a new place. Especially some content on a few Broadcom chips seemed to be quite popular. So for now, some first steps can be found here:

https://xenos1984.github.io/hwdb/
https://xenos1984.github.io/hwdb/proc/broadcom/bcm7405/

[Nable]

Oh, I'm really happy to see that this project is going on. I think I should finally revive the drowned server with HWDB.

[xenos]

Oh, I'm really happy to see that this project is going on. I think I should finally revive the drowned server with HWDB.

That would also be great! I was wondering, didn't we have some problem with spam on MediaWiki? I don't remember whether that problem was on wikinet or your instance... In any case, either a Wiki or github pages would probably allow also others to contribute.