ROMS, ROMS, ROMS

I’ve been on a ROM building spree again, if anyone would like to try out the very latest changes in RISC OS 5.17, you can download the ROM images from here;

www.robheaton.co.uk/riscos/roms

I’ll try and update the roms every few days.

EDIT: 07/01/2012 – ROMs are now at RISC OS v5.19

This looks great, but forgive my ignorance, are these simple to use with RPCEmu?

I’m interested in a Beagleboard, but I think I may as well try out a few things under emulation first before I splash out.

Has anyone tried to use RO 5 with VRPC or RedSqirrel?

Yes they have.

@Colin: RO 5.17 seems to run fine on RPCEmu (at any rate, on the version recently supplied by ROOL on USB Stick which I bought at the London Show :-) ). I find I have to right-click for Menu, and there is no HardDisc4 hard drive available (you use HostFS instead) but otherwise it behaves just like 5.16 on my Iyonix.

have to right-click for Menu

How about remapping the buttons?

Has something happened to ShareFS in the latest ROM builds. Using Rob Heaton’s latest build (111211) and the latest on the ROOL download page, I am unable to transfer stuff from my Iyonix or RPC to my Beagleboard xM. I can see and access the other machines on ShareFS, but as soon as I try to transfer anything I get the dreaded red hourglass, followed by a message that contact with the remote machine has been lost. Returning to an earlier ROM build corrects the problem.

Nothing in ShareFS has changed (it’s still closed source, so all we get is a prebuilt version). But a couple of days ago I did get a red hourglass myself while just using my BB to browse folders on my Iyonix. So it’s possible something has broken it, although I’m not sure what.

There does seem something different about the 12th Dec ROM as I installed that on my BB Xm and the time reverts back to 1970. I have NetTime set up to look at uk.pool.ntp.org in Choices.Internet.User as below:

“Set Inet$NTPServer uk.pool.ntp.org
RmEnsure NetTime 0 RmLoad System:Modules.Network.NetTime”

Also trying to access “http://www.reuters.com/news” or “www.btplc.com” gives time out errors and something about SSL connections timed out.

Reverting back to the 4th Dec ROM ensures the time is set correctly at boot up in the absence of a battery backup and these websites are available again via Netsurf.

I have tried redownloading the 12th Dec Beagle ROM and also using SDCreate as well as BBFlash and both operations give the same results as above.

Yes, I’ve just found the same result, with NetSurf reporting “SSL connection timeout”
Sadly, I don’t have a previous ROM! :(

The time on my BB Xm seems fine, NetTime loaded correctly and did it’s job…

Well NetTime sets itself up but doesn’t resolve to the time server.

I wonder if it is also to do with how you can set the time or the SSL issue?

As the readme says:

“if Inet$NTPServer is set, then NetTime will contact that server using NTP

else if Inet$TimeServer is set, then NetTime will contact that server using UDP Time Protocol

else if NetTime$Server is set, then NetTime will contact that server using NTP or UDP Time Protocol"

If I get time I will try the later to see what happens.

Sadly, I don’t have a previous ROM!

I’m using your ROM of 6th December, which seems to be working fine – both for Netsurf and file trasnsfer on my home network. Would you like a copy, Rob?

Yes Please!
My Email address is: rob @ robheaton . co . uk

Yes Please!

SENT,SENT,SENT :-)))

Cheers Kevin!

If anyone else needs an older OMAP3 ROM, you can download them from here;
Download Link

It looks like the ShareFS problem (and I’d assume the other networking problems) are being caused by a bug somewhere in the changes I made to OS_Heap. If I force the PCI module (which manages the IO memory used by some non-PCI things like the USB drivers) to use its old method for allocating memory then everything’s fine. I’ll add some logging code and find out what the problem is.

I’ve built a custom OMAP3 ROM based on the current CVS (15/12/2011) but with the recent OS_Heap changes removed.
I’m at work at the moment, so I can’t test it until later tonight.

Custom OMAP3 ROM Download

I’ve just tested the custom ROM I posted above, NetSurf is working properly with SSL and Grapevine connects to MSN again.
(Grapevine previously kept telling me that I had signed in at another location.)

This is turning out to be a bit of a funny one. The good news is that it doesn’t seem to be a bug in my heap changes. The bad news is that I’m still not sure exactly where the bug is. It seems to be a problem with the location of the devicefs USB buffers that etherusb is using. Just shifting them a few bytes forwards in memory is enough to make the bug dissappear. There’s no sign of memory corruption around the buffers, so the only things I can think of would be bugs in the EHCI driver/DMA controller (unlikely), or a bug in some code that’s copying data into/out of the buffers that’s triggered if the buffers have a certain alignment.

I’ve checked in a change which seems to fix the issue. It looks like there’s a bug in the EHCI controller which can cause it to fail to write the data to memory properly (or at all?) if the last packet of a BULK IN transfer is a short packet which crosses a page boundary. It sounds implausible that a bug as serious as this hasn’t been discovered yet (there’s no mention of it in the latest DM37x errata), but after dumping out the contents of the buffers it’s clear that the controller sometimes stops writing out the data once it reaches the page boundary.

Sometime in the new year I suspect I’ll have to return to this and try and produce a test case I can send to TI.

I also have the ShareFS problem mentioned by Kevin. However, whilst I am able to transfer a single WAV file across from my Iynonix, pulling from the BB, transferring a program (containing many small files) fails.

Stan, I’ve built a new OMAP3 ROM with Jeffreys latest fix applied. Can you please try the ROM below and report back.

OMAP3 ROM Download

Can you please try the ROM … and report back

Rob, I’ve tried it as well and it seems to work fine here. Copies from my Iyonix with no problems.

Excellent! Once again, thanks to Jeffrey Lee!

Rob, the job appears to be a good ‘un. I’ve just browsed my website stored locally on the Iyonix across ShareFS and it works fine. I have copied my Firefox directory from the Iyonix to the BB whilst copying the mozilla folder from the Iyonix Boot to the BB at the same time.

This fix, and the new ROM saves me having to use a USB stick to transfer stuff from the Iyonix to the BB. Thanks to both you and Jeffrey.