Asus Transformer Prime: Unlock the device

Five times “We don’t suggest to do this” blah blah
This fucking new-speak for “we wanna burn you in our own crappy software with a lot of payment you’ll have to give us.
Please keep us paying for crappy software instead of just doing our job and producing just the hardware with good documentation instead.”

I’ve just told a friend of mine, basically the only good SoC producer is TI and the best engineered Laptops I received until now are the Toshiba Satellite series.

Put the engineers of TI and Toshiba into a room together with Linus Torwalds and lock them in until they have tinkered a new device together.

And the result will be something you get wet dreams of 😉

I9100G, boot loader and UART

Well then.
I’ve now tinkered together my own debugging interface for the GT-9100G:

Output on UART is the following:

Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.41 (Jan 11 2012 - 23:25:41) <-- FBL
Uboot-loading from Emmc <-- SBL == U-Boot
Starting OS Bootloader from EMMC ...

I’ve sent an email to Samsung, requesting the relevant patches to X-Loader in order for it to successfully initialize the I9100G-board.
If they refuse to send me the informations in which way they have modified the sources in order to run them on their board, it’s a GPL violation.
But I’m still confident that they will cooperate.

GNU/Linux on NotionInk Adam

Folks, I’m giving up.
This hardware is just unusable.
This tablet is only usable, when you’re using it in a cold storage house under GNU/Linux.
Because of the hardware bugs every system using multi threading only boots once, when the tablet has been lying around for some days at a cold place (like let’s say in the wine cellar)
After having been warmed up a bit, it randomly freezes somewhere in the boot process which leads to funny things like a half built up login screen…
Can’t these people read the design guide lines and data sheets before they start wildly connecting some wires and give a PCB into production?
Also this TEGRA2 chip is already a unusable piece of crap.
And people buy this crap…
Can’t we just get rid of all companies producing SoCs except Texas Instruments and can’t TI do their smart phones them self by the way?
Would make the hardware market grow rapidly in quality… >.>

Texas Instruments is obviously the only company producing usable SoCs ATM

  • Good documentation
  • Works as expected
  • Nearly NO ASIC-errors (There are some like the battery bug in OMAP35xx)

Business processes and FOSS

Can someone please silence these managers ordering the engineers to upload a zip file instead of configuring a git repo? And why the hell don’t they just include the .git folder? And why are there people reimporting tar files into git?

At the end it’s just pissing me off and it’s kinda assholish upon the engineers whose commit logs you’ve just deleted…

At least now the new Samsung Galaxy S2 (GT-I9100G) has an OMAP4 inside.
The only usable SoC on the market.
Yes! The only!

Android…

Samsung Galaxy S2 and Asus Transformer Prime, both with Android market…
I don’t pay for software, I’m FOSS user…

WTF? Money for installing packages?
My solution for such an issue is easy.

If it costs, don’t use it 🙂

Tegra arratum 657451

And again, increasing recursive Googling…

(3) ...however, if you have a stock eglibc
and a kernel with the erratum workaround disabled/removed,
then things seem in practice to work OK.
Speculation is that perhaps the erratum is only
a problem in marginal situations (eg if the core is very hot).

Ok, wtf. “marginal situations”?
Does that mean, the hardware has the freedom to not execute the code in cases where it hates the user, like in my case? >_>

Seriously, the core hasn’t reached high temperatures yet, but still shows sign of this bug.
Ok, cancel sign: a system where already /sbin/init segfaults is not a sign, it’s more like “no discussion”

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eglibc/+bug/739374

Anyway. I’ve now made a portage overlay for eglibc and am cross-compiling eglibc-2.15 in this very moment.
Let’s see if switching Gentoo to eglibc solves my problems…

BTW: The overlay can be found under:
https://gitorious.org/o2s-gentoo/eglibc-overlay/trees/master

Automatic kernel configuration

Didn’t everyone already dream of that?
Ok… Not everyone, just the hardcore nerds and hackers like me, who aren’t only using bleeding edge software but more or less blood dropping flesh wound software (yes, sometimes even -9999- ebuilds in Gentoo >_< )

I guess BenBee asked me some time ago, if this would be possible…

Yes it is
./kdetect.sh
and
./autokernconf.sh

Should do the trick.
Go to the following source: http://cateee.net/autokernconf/

TEGRA2 and GLIBC

Not only, that the list of hazards within a tegra2 grows and grows and the errata option list within menuconfig now already is longer then the list of boards containing this SoC…
Obviously the hazards make it impossible to use any GLIBC newer then 2.12.1 …
Folks! WTF!?

GNU/Linux on “galaxy S2 i9100”

Howdy
A friend of mine owns a “Samsung Galaxy S2”
CPU-info tells us there is a SMDKV310 SoC in it:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : ARMv7 Processor rev 1 (v7l)
processor       : 0
BogoMIPS: 1592.52

Features: swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x2
CPU part: 0xc09
CPU revision    : 1

Hardware: SMDKV310
 Revision: 000e
 Serial  : 304d19f743777c9e

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git;a=blob;f=arch/arm/mach-exynos/mach-smdkv310.c;h=83b91fa777c1aeb4ca5ee95ff81f244a1641e904;hb=HEAD

Looks as there would be support for it in upstream.
Let’s see if it boots as well. ( e.g. upstream support for tegra2 is just formalism, the code in master doesn’t do anything useful)

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