Update on dingux for the GA330

News via http://www.dingux.com/2011/02/update...-for-a330.html

It's been way too long since the last entry. First I delayed it a bit just to have something actually substantial to write, and then then stretched it a bit longer, and well, here we are.

After coming back from China I had a list of tasks I had agreed with the ChinaChip management and engineers to get dingux up and running on the A330 in the near term. There was also the possibility of they sponsoring the development. To make a long story short, I was willing to anything between working on my spare time for free and being hired full time, and I was expecting something in between: I'm way too expensive for full time dedication (plus it's probably too soon for that) and while I'd be happy to work in my spare time, that would of course come with no commitment to any schedule or even to completion.

Since then, there's been some kind of priority rearrangement in ChinaChip and the "dingux on the A330" project as been put on hold. That means that the engineers that would do their part (mostly adapting their firmware to allow comfortable dingux installation in the internal flash) aren't available at the moment to work on it. And delivery of the required information to get a kernel port to the CC1800 running has been... well... slow. I got the most important part a couple of weeks ago. And no sponsoring. So I'll do my best but again, don't hold your breath, since as of now my job and my family allow only for a very limited amount of spare time.

The partial CC1800 programmer's manual I've got is 38 pages long. And consists of a couple of paragraphs describing each peripheral and tables of registers. Only the names of the registers and the bit fields. All in Chinese. The Texas Instruments OMAP3503 programmer's manual is +3000 pages. Go figure.

Not that I'm really complaining, since I truly believe that's what they have from the people that actually designed the CC1800. The cheese is in the BSP, which is code, which means if something is not properly done or downright broken you can't fix it, since you don't have a reference programmer's manual.

I wanted to end this post with some tech details about the A330 boot process and memory map, but I have to leave now, so it'll go in the next post.