Message #63 Posted by Walter B on 4 Aug 2011, 1:52 a.m.,
in response to message #62 by Paul Dale
Quote:
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Anyway each image is independent and persistent across firmware re-selects and of course power off events. The entire memory content, device state, and NUT virtual cpu context is maintained for each model version.Oh well, it would have been nice :-(
AFAI understand, that's a set of logically completely independent applications on one HW. That's more than I've expected :-) So I don't understand the :-( above :-?
Sorry, for the late reply.
I believe what Pauli was really asking was whether the runtime context (user stack and register memory) was available between
models such that exchange of data was possible.
That of course exists by default as memory is just one flat
space with individual data context being structured identically.
The task of shuffling data between models is really
an external UI effort as it is unlikely we're going to be
patching the legacy firmware to implement such a feature.
That said, depending on the mechanism for prospective data
sharing, it would still be quite helpful to have annotated
firmware source for all of the Voyager series particularly
in the case such sharing involved tweaking individual RWM
image context unbeknownst to the corresponding firmware.
I have bits and pieces of the 15c firmware documented from
cases where I was chasing KEMU issues. A
more comprehensive and scalable approach would be to modify
a NUT assembler to accept hex binary in addition to instruction
mnemonics so we could start with the binary image,
reconstructing the source incrementally, "reassembling" and
verifying the image as needed after annotation changes.
This assumes some sort of open source like effort to address
entire firmware images (and ideally a nod or minimally some
indication from HP not to contest such an effort). Having
this available is likely useful to HP as well but perhaps not
something at the top of the to-do task list.