[U-Boot] reverse engineering a Philips photoframe

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Walter,

In message <CAJojfjo4ufGzqgR_m6v84yhgeanZ68FHvoGRzscSxBmgonPWhA at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> 
> guess I'm not so lucky:

That was to be expected.  The file was way too small for a complete
U-Boot - that would be in the order of 200 kB or more.

> I have figured out that central to the board is a TMS320DM350ZWK chip which
> seems to contain a fullblown ARM9 processor. This seems capable of running
> what is referred to by TI as DaVinci Linux. That in turn seems to be
> commonly supported by Uboot. My question now is how to figure out how I
> would go about getting to the point where the TMS chip runs Uboot.

To port U-Boot (and Linux) to new hardware, you need detailled
documentation of the hardware, ideally including schematics,
minimally a detailled block diagram and the pin mux table.

> strings doesn't gives me a long list of things there. What I noticed is
> that for instance the artwork is simply byte for byte in the P350MAIN.BIN
> file, so extracting it was easy. This makes me think it might not be a
> filesystem, rather maybe even as simple as a bunch of files concatenated
> into a single bin file. Is that common?

It can be anything. there is a zillion of ways to pack stuff into
images... It my help to look for compression headers - strings does
not help on compressed images / compressed parts within an image.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,      Managing Director: Wolfgang Denk
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
F u cn rd ths u cnt spl wrth a dm!