mattst88
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
I think they're also super useless, to be honest. Incredibly slow. Linux support continued to degrade the entire time I owned mine. The keyboard and display are far too small to be usable. The graphics chip accelerates basically nothing.
I sold mine [1] on eBay back in October. I hope the new owner enjoys it more than I did :)
I looked at some particular parts of the PROM that took a while to understand to see if I could have understood them quicker with Ghidra. In particular, the part of `sloader` that searches for the `post1` and `firmware` sections and then calls `post1(&firmware)`. Given that I already understand how this works, I can see that this is happening from the decompiled C, but the lack of labels, comments, etc really hampers my ability to understand from the decompiled C alone.
This might all be down to inexperience with the tool.
The ability to iteratively add a label, rerun the decompiler, reread the decompiled assembly, make more inferences was really the key to building an understanding for me.
Another aspect I'm unsure how to handle in Ghidra is that the base address differs between sections of the firmware. E.g. the `firmware` section is copied to RAM and executed from `0x81000000`. It's not clear to me how to configure this in a granular way, rather than a single base address for the whole PROM image.
I'll give Ghidra a try!
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it
Incredible the amount of detail the judgement goes into in documenting how big a fraud Craig Wright is.
This is spot on and was exactly my experience at my last job.
The one thing I'll add is that for me it wasn't about not having a purpose, it was about not feeling appreciated for all of the time/effort/energy I'd poured into that purpose.
That's not true at all. See:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/07/firefox-115-intel-gpu-vi... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mozilla-Firefox-115 https://www.omglinux.com/firefox-hardware-acceleration-raspb...
I'm not rebuilding specifically for this one potential optimization.
Netflix. ex-Google. ex-Intel. Gentoo Developer.