Hi guys!

I'm looking for a little help on an installer application for the "efika.forth" script.

Basically, through an egregious hack of exposed firmware functionality it is possible to upload data to memory and give instructions to "nvstore" this data into the nvramrc of the Efika. This trashes what you had in the original nvramrc but allows the whole script and any options you had, to be permanently installed in the Efika boot process.

Through experimentation and a lot of very time consuming testing I decided the best way to do this is through two binary tools - one to encode efika.forth into an appropriate format (this could just as well be a perl or awk/sed script), and another to take it (as data encoded into a C array) and perform the store operations.

I have worked out full specification an expectation for the operation of the installer.

This project will NOT be open source but you WILL be credited for it.

I need a couple of experienced C developers possibly with experience of development directly on the firmware level (i.e. writing boot loaders etc.) that can write these tools so that we can present this as a single-use solution rather than the complicated end-user hack. It will help Linux adoption of removal of the weird patches for the Efika and improve the device tree specification compliance of the board. It may mean we can put a proper Efika kernel on the Fedora CD, move to the new network driver, and other things besides.

Hopefully future firmware releases will make it obselete, but this is a good thing. I am also interested in users who would be smart enough to work out a few firmware internals on Pegasos, so that we may do the same thing for Pegasos II fixup script (the functionality exposed there is not as easily tweaked as on the Efika).

Any takers? Please post here or mail me directly (you know the address :)

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Matt Sealey

Sounds interesting 8)
Am I the right person to do that :?
Not so sure! :(
- Never done a boot loader so far.
- Don't understand FORTH.
- You're looking for a *COUPLE* of programmers
... while I am #SINGLE#.
+ Hacked a SCSI device driver under OS-9
(#NOT# the one from Apple - the one from Microware)
+ Assembler experience on 8-bit MCUs and 68k
+ Knowledge in early Xilinx FPGA-programming
+ C-programming under OS-9/68k,
Codewarrior for Windows and Linux
+ Latest experience: Tinkering with Linux Kernel
for TUN/TAP-support.
----
Did I get the job right?
- Should this installer be able to upgrade the OpenFirmware
FLASH code prior to start an OS-installation (Fedora)?

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rm

It's not a boot loader. It will simply be a set of tools to optimize/rationalize efika.forth into an appropriate format, and then a small tool most likely written in C to manipulate certain firmware features which enables it to be embedded in the nvramrc script (as accessed through 'nvedit')
You don't need to apart from the basic concept of how it deals with whitespace.
I just thought it would be faster with a team than with one guy. After all, I am one guy, and I don't have time. I have the ideas down but not the resources to carry it out. If you coded the examples from K&R you're experienced enough, but building software for firmware usage would probably be a good idea. Have you read David Holm's writing kernels for Open Firmware "article"? It's in the left sidebar on this site.. if you understand it, you're in.
No. It's far more cute a solution than that.

I'll bug you next week about it :D

_________________
Matt Sealey