free firmware for 88W8388

[Albert Cahalan]

R?zs?s G?d?ny writes:

> I started to modify qemu to emulate 88W8388. Now it can load
> the firmware (usb8388.bin) into ram and starts the firmware,

Wonderful.

I hope you can make options to start with any of the 3 firmwares.
Perhaps I wish to try writing a boot1 or boot2.

> - emulate the usb device of the 8388 and create a connection
> between the linux kernel driver and the emulator so from linux
> pow starting the emulator looks as plugging in the usb device

This would be nice.

> - modify qemu so that i/o ports of 8388 could be accessed from
> outside of the emulator. I guess that the arm core of 8388
> communicates with the other parts (the radio interface) via
> io ports so if we can see which ports are read/written by the
> arm core we can do the same from the free firmware.

"accessed from outside"? (to just view them, to hook them up to
something, etc.?)

Once somebody finds the serial port pins on the XO, things get
really interesting. You could connect that serial port to the
serial port of the XO. You could then run the emulator while
a stub firmware does MMIO to the real hardware. Qemu passes the
MMIO request over the serial link, the firmware stub does it,
and then the firmware stub returns the result. Maybe you can
even do interrupts this way.

> Anyway, if we want to write the free firmware, a good emulator
> of 8388 is handy.
>
> Anybody interested ?

Yes! I've been wishing for exactly this. I hope you can post the
code soon.

Maybe someday we can have a whole virtual XO. (Geode,EC,88W8388)