Soliciting OFW testers

[Mitch Bradley]

I've just released OFW Q2E24 ( 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q2e24 ) which is a test 
candidate for the upcoming 8.2.1 release.  There are a couple of things 
that could use some testing, so I'm soliciting help.

Firstly, if you have 2 or more XOs and are willing to overwrite the NAND 
FLASH on one of them, you could test the NANDblaster, see 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Multicast_NAND_FLASH_Update .

Secondly, if you have a USB CD-ROM drive, you could help me by testing 
it with OFW.  To do so:

a) Remove all other USB storage devices (FLASH keys and the like) from 
the XO
b) Put a CD-ROM that has an ISO-9660 filesystem (the standard CD-ROM 
filesystem) in the drive
c) Plug the drive into the XO
d) Power on and get to the ok prompt in the usual way
d) Type

    ok dir u:\

If it works, you'll see a directory listing, perhaps after several 
seconds (CD-ROM drives can take a long time to spin up and read the 
disk's table of contents).  If it doesn't work, it might hang, or it 
might say "Can't open directory" and perhaps even "Can't open disk label 
package".

If it fails, there are a couple of other things to try that would give 
me useful information:

1) Look in the "USB2 devices:" list to see if there is a line like:

    /pci/usb at f,5/scsi at 1,0/disk'

That's the CD-ROM assuming that you have removed all other USB storage 
devices.
It might be "scsi at 2,0" or "scsi at 3,0" depending on which USB port you used.

2) Power off then back on, get to the ok prompt and type:

   ok dev u
   ok : max-transfer 800 ;
   ok dend
   ok dir u:\

That patch reduces the transfer size to one CD-ROM sector, so the driver 
doesn't do read-ahead of large chunks.  That shouldn't make a 
difference, but I have one CD-ROM drive that flakes out with long 
transfers while working okay with short ones.  I'd like to know if that 
is a common problem or just a bad drive.

Thanks,
Mitch Bradley