Genesi - EFIKA MX Smartbook

With ref to the Genesi – EFIKA MX Smartbook – web page.

Bottom right – main page – Power developer -

Ref Arm riscos port – called RISC OS in the post.

Any idea if any help can be given to move this process on.

Is there an overview on what is required to get RO 5 on new hardware?

Tks

You’re talking about this thread, I assume?

Michael Grunditz has already found his way to our forums and asked a few questions (see here). So if/when he comes back I’m sure we’ll be able to provide him with the help and information he needs.

If he hasn’t got hold of the compiler yet then you might want to check whether he’d be willing to let you (or someone else) buy a copy for him. Other than that it looks like it’s down to him to get the port started, since it looks like it’s going to be difficult for anyone outside of Genesi to get a hold of the relevant hardware docs.

Hi

If someone donates the compiler and I get some spare-time I might be able to start. A working usb-ethernet dongle would also be encouraging.

Where are you? Stockholm? I wonder if there are any other RISC OS users there.

Hi Michael,

if you contact me at steffen.huber@gmx.de I am sure we can work out a way to sponsor you an ethernet USB dongle and the compiler.

For anyone slightly concerned this is vapourware: here’s a photo from MWC 2011 of the Smarttop, with the Smartbook to the right.

And, incidentally, their prices have been reduced recently¹.

¹ Half price (-ish), by comparision with [1], [2].

It would be great if we did have the option of Genesi hardware. I had a Pegasus II system from Genesi a few years back and was very happy with it.

Michael should have received his compiler now, and the USB dongle is on its way soon. So everything else is now up to him ;-)

Thanks for assisting Steffen! And good luck to Mr Grunditz :)

And, incidentally, their prices have been reduced recently.

In the press, at Linuxfordevices.

Ok so step one:

U-Boot# loady 0×90100000

1. Ready for binary (ymodem) download to 0×90100000 at 115200 bps…
   C## Total Size = 0×00000058 = 88 Bytes
   U-Boot# go 0×90100000
2. Starting application at 0×90100000 …
   RISCOS

:D

Ok so step one:

But that was with the gnu assembler , so off to try it with the riscos toolchain :)

So bypassing the standard OS boot is possible then, if I’ve understood your post correctly. I hope you can get easy access to all the hardware docs you need.

Hi everyone

I have spent jan-mars at hospital , so the progress have been very slow.
I have some questions:

1. How do I extract the sources. When I use untbz I get annoying suffixes to the files like it was on a FAT filesystem.
2. Is there any documentation of objasm, the syntax is very different from the gnu assembler.

/Michael

Hi and sorry to hear you’ve been in hospital for so long. I hope it was nothing too serious and that you’re making a good recovery.

How do I extract the sources. When I use untbz I get annoying suffixes to the files like it was on a FAT filesystem.

I also encoutered this recently, but UnTarBZ2 worked for me in the end. There’s also the Colin’s version, which you could try.

Is there any documentation of objasm, the syntax is very different from the gnu assembler.

Maybe you should try Ben.

No luck in extracting the files. If I get a working ethernet nic , could I use sunfish and extract the file on the nfs server ?

Yeah, sunfish should work. I’ll have a look at the archives tonight to see if there’s anything funny going on.

Regarding objasm – on the C tools CD there should be a folder containing PDF documentation for the assembler and the other main tools. From what I remember the assembler docs are pretty easy to follow, so if you have a skim through that then it should give you a better understanding of the syntax & features. Apart from the obvious syntax differences I think the main things you’ll run into are:

• The ability to load immediate constants using “LDR <Rt>,=<value>”. The assembler automatically groups together these constants and stores them in literal pools (specifically, wherever the LTORG directives are placed)
• I’m not quite sure what the correct name for it is, but you can define a structure as being relative to a certain register. E.g. it’s traditional for a relocatable module to use R12 as its workspace pointer. So in the assembler source for the module the workspace structure would be defined to be relative to R12, then whenever the compiler sees something like “LDR R0,MyWorkspaceVar” it will automatically expand it to “LDR R0,[R12,#offsetof_MyWorkspaceVar]”. The only downside to this is that the base register is fixed in the definition of the structure, so you can’t (easily) use two different base registers in two different routines.
• Lots of complex macros. objasm’s macro syntax is very powerful, almost an entire scripting language in its own right.

It looks like there are two different versions of UnTarBZ2 on the site. http://www.riscosopen.org/tarballs/untarbz2.zip is an old version which has numerous issues. But the self-extracting version linked from the Ancillary Downloads section of this page is newer, and appears to extract everything fine (although I’ll admit that I haven’t checked every single file!).

You can check the !Help file to work out if you’ve got the new version or not (copyright year should be 2011), or the date of the ‘tar’ utility in !UnTarBZ2.Tools (should be Jan 2011).

However since it looks like it was only ‘tar’ that was rebuilt, you will have to rub with alignment exceptions turned off to avoid bzip2 crashing.

However since it looks like it was only ‘tar’ that was rebuilt, you will have to rub with alignment exceptions turned off to avoid bzip2 crashing.

I uncompressed it with bzip2 on my pc and just extracted the tar file on BB.

What filetype should I set on the selfextracting archive ?

Now back to assembler:

I have a very small “program” that only does a MOV R1,#0. The compiler doesn’t give me a error but get stuck in running mode. If I add a label before the instruction it complains that I have code in the DATA section.

What filetype should I set on the selfextracting archive ?

Utility

I have a very small “program” that only does a MOV R1,#0. The compiler doesn’t give me a error but get stuck in running mode. If I add a label before the instruction it complains that I have code in the DATA section.

So the compiler just hung? That doesn’t sound too good!

I think you need to do two things to make the code compile – use an AREA directive to specify that it’s a code area, and place an END directive at the end of the file (In fact you need an END directive at the end of every file, including ones fetched by GET). I can’t test it since I’m at work, but I think the following should compile:

  AREA MyTestApp, CODE, READONLY
  MOV R0,#1
  END

I’m sure there must also be some simple examples on the tools CD which you can take a look at if you get stuck. (Also pay attention to the leading spaces, as anything that doesn’t have leading whitespace will be treated as a label, although I’m sure you’ll have spotted that already)

My small code is written with AREA and END .

Hmm, that’s odd. Can you paste a copy of the program and the command line you’re using to compile it? I’ll see if I can recreate the issue when I get home. Also have you tried any of the samples yet to check that they work?

Hi everyone , I am not getting anywhere with my unpacking issues. I consider to upgrade my RPC to RO4 and stongarm. The RPC has a NIC and serialport which will become handy.

Hi. I have rebuilt all of the tools in the !UnTarBZ2 application (both the zip file and self-extracting versions). This update should be ARMv7 safe (see below) and probably also RISC OS 6 (e.g. a9home) safe, too. Not that I can test it on the latter. As for how to unpack the self-extracting UnTarBZ2 program, this is documented from the downloads page (see the big “Info” icon next to the download?). https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/other-zipfiles

Note: we don’t build bunzip2 from source; that comes from here – so I’ve no idea if this is also ARMv7 safe.

A quick status update:

I have managed to build the OMAP rom in RO4 emulated and my test code also builds.

I have not managed to turn off the align exceptions on the beagleboard, it justr crashes.