Oct 28
If you think you're too old to enjoy halloween, think again. This article discusses 15 interesing facts about halloween that just may bring the spirit of the hoilday back to life for you this year.

Tagi: halloween facts, interesing facts, grown ups, hoilday, ups, halloween, spirit

Dec 4

FREE SHIPPING ON ALL BOSCH TOOLS! Until December 31st you can get free shipping on all Bosch Tool orders over $100 by simply using the coupon code BOSCH at checkout. You can also call 800-242-4424 and simply say you would like the free shipping on your Bosch Tools. Good for free UPS ground shipping anywhere in the continental US.

FREE PS20-2A & PS40-2A! Buy 3 PS20-2A or 3 PS40-2A and get 1 free instantly. These make great holiday gifts for anyone and at that price with the free shipping deal you will not find a better deal on the internet for these tools. These are all brand new tools with full manufacturer warranty, in the box with batteries, charger and case. Offer good until December 31st or while supplies last, limit 1 of each tool per customer, applies to all orders worldwide.

FREE BATTERY ON 14.4V & 18V DRILLS! This is a Mail-in rebate good on all the new Bosch Lithium Ion Drills. The Compact Tough & Brute Tough tools have been incredible popular since their launch a month ago. At 650 lb torque the 18V Brute Hammer has highest torque of any 18v drill on the market today. These tools are all very high quality made in Switzerland and priced very competitively with the 14.4v compact at only $199.       

        


Tagi: great holiday gifts, bosch tools, bosch tool, nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp, free ups, tough tools, tool orders, simy, free battery, manufacturer warranty, worldwide free, mail, holiday deals, power tool, mth, new tools, launch, ups, lithium, december 31

Dec 4
So the methodology has currently been trying to proceed as quickly as possible, trying to get every device working and aiming for breadth instead of stability. This allows me to do more high-value tasks like reverse engineering, rapidly gaining understanding of the platform instead of just getting bogged down debugging every single thing. Unfortunately, we're paying a bit for it now as I try to get things into gear to put together applications.

First thing is, I don't really trust the current memory structure. For one thing, it's WEIRD. It seems like even if I turn the MMU off, 0x0 is still mapped to 0x18000000. I know the MMU is working, somewhat, because if I allow the heap to run into the place I put my pagetable, bad things happen. =P I understand there's not going to be enough devices or memory to fill out the entire 32-bit address space, though, so maybe there was already some sort of static mapping. I also believe 0x9000000 (the range used by iboot's file transfer facility) is mapped to 0x18100000. That is, 0x0 == 0x80000000 == 0x18000000. The problem is that there are no such mappings in the page table. 0x80000000 to 0x180000000 is set cacheable and bufferable, but is identity mapped. Anyone have enough experience with the hardware to tell me if this makes sense? I mean, maybe it's just that the top 4 bits are just completely ignored by the memory controller.

Second thing is, sometimes I get random freeze-ups and I don't know why. Maybe I'm just hallucinating or screwing up somewhere, or maybe it's just me failing at C (wouldn't be the first time this happened). Anyway, the upshot is, I want to go back through and clean up/refactor the code into its final form. I tried to follow best programming practices as much as possible the first time around, but sometimes it just was too inefficient to do so when dealing with only half-way reverse engineered device drivers.

The third thing is what I'm working on currently. I need openiboot to replace iBoot. I currently have written a pretty simple chainloader. All it does is warm up all the devices as usual, and then load iBoot from NOR and then jumps to it. iBoot is relocateable and should be able to get itself to the right place. Now this works fine from a copy of openiboot that is started from iBoot using "go", but after I flash openiboot onto the "ibot" image in NOR, the device goes straight to DFU. Now either I'm screwing up hardware initialization or there is some additional verification (checksums, probably not signatures) done before LLB wants to load iboot. It may be that the latter is more likely, since I end up in DFU mode rather than a hung device. Not sure if the device is intelligent enough to recognize a failed boot if I don't say, update the powernvram.

After I get this working, the next thing is to see if the gamma table stuff works then (and if not, fix it). After that, the boot menu I talked about can be written. The next thing I want to work on is NAND FTL. That's the last piece before we reach the end of the "openiboot" phase and can move into the Linux phase. Pretty much all the drivers people expect will be ready and the fun can begin.

I know it seems like we're still very far, but I think we've made very concrete and tremendous progress in a fairly reasonable period of time. A lot of things are now clear and the biggest obstacles are not Apple's protections, or a lack of understanding, but merely my own stupid mistakes and typos.

Speaking of horribly stupid mistakes, my next post will be the story of how I almost bricked my phone yesterday night (but not really :P).

Tagi: freeze ups, memory structure, static mapping, programming practices, mmu, sime, single thing, address space, reverse engineering, device drivers, mappings, upshot, file transfer, ups, breadth, heap, methodology, ace

Dec 4
New Ramdisk
Posted by George Hotz in ramdisk, crypt on 12 4th, 2008| icon3
In the KBAG section of the img3 files, you'll find 0x20 bytes after the section header. Decrypt them with the hardware AES engine and get
IV: 29681F625D1F61271EC3116601B8BCDE
KEY: 850AFC271132D15AE6989565567E65BF
(this is the 2.0 ramdisk)

Tagi: ramdisk, crypt

Dec 6

Why would you need to wait in line at 5am, uphill both ways in 10 feet of snow just to fight Pit Bulls with lipstick (aka Hockey Moms) to try and save a few bucks? Ohio Power Tool is already putting out lots of awesome power tools at special discounted pricing and not refurbished or last year’s leftovers but the new good stuff. Check out the Top Tool Deals page to get some great gift ideas. Remember these prices also work with any other deals for Free Tools, Mail-in Rebates and/or Free Shipping.

The Free Shipping Deal is good until Monday December 7th, a week after Cyber Monday on many major brands including Bosch, Milwaukee, Dremel, Ingersoll Rand, CST/berger & Ridgid. Simply use Coupon Code TURKEY at checkout for free UPS ground shipping.

Visit Ohio Power Tool for a wide selection of tools at everyday discount prices. There are also a variety of mail-in rebates and other deals you can check out on the home page. You can also call 800-242-4424 during business hours to place any order, just mention the Free Shipping special.  

    


Tagi: ups ground shipping, amp nbsp, hockey moms, great gift ideas, bucks ohio, cst berger, ingersoll rand, free ups, pit bulls, uphill both ways, mail, mday, simy, rsquo, black friday, cyber monday, ridgid, power tool, dremel, ups

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