Announcing Q2F10 for XO-1

[James Cameron]

On Tue, May 01, 2012 at 02:10:28AM -0700, Hal Murray wrote:
> Running q2f10.rom with that USB Flash drive plugged in...
> 
> ok dir u: says "Can't open directory"
> ok dir disk: says
> fat-file-system
> (and files/dirs I that seem reasonable, including q2f10.rom that I loaded.)
> 
> In case it matters, this USB drive is old, old, old...  16 MB.  :)

Ah, right, I can guess what might be going on.  The device is not
available soon enough after the bus is probed.

When you type "dir u:" and press enter, the USB bus is probed first,
then the device is accessed.

When you type "dir disk:" and press enter, the device is accessed
without a USB bus probe.

You might work around this problem with that USB drive by either:

1.  plugging in the USB drive before starting Open Firmware, and then
using "disk:" in place of "u:", or

2.  plugging in the USB drive after starting Open Firmware, using
"probe-usb" first (which can be abbreviated to "p2"), then using "disk:"
in place of "u:".

You might determine the time required for the device to settle by adding
a delay between probe and access.

	ok probe-usb d# 500 ms dir disk:

If that works, lower the delay until it does not.  Otherwise increase
the delay.  The delay is in decimal milliseconds.

I've looked through the changes from Q2F08 to Q2F09 for anything that 
might have caused this.  There is nothing obvious.

I've looked through the changes from Q2F09 to Q2F10 for anything that
might have caused this.  There is one tiny change in svn 2943 that
removes UFS partition support, and this _may_ have led to less elapsed
time between probe and access.  But this does not explain what you saw
before the upgrade.

The USB drive may respond differently over time due to changes to the
flash cells.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/