Firmware bring-up status

[Das Signal]

On Fri, May 01, 2015 at 08:15:48PM +0000, Spacefalcon the Outlaw wrote:

> Now a good question to ask would be: can we still do this comparison
> between our own fw and the TCS211 reference if the two run on different
> target devices?  Could we not compare the behavior of our fw running
> on Mot/Pirelli against that of TCS211 running on the GTA02 modem?  I
> think we can probably do it in many cases, and it may be useful.
> 
> But then we get to another problem: just like TCS211 and all other
> standard TI firmwares, our current fw uses separate UART channels for
> the AT command interface and for RVTMUX.  My medium-term plan is to
> implement a way to pass AT commands over RVTMUX, so we can make do
> with just one UART - there is only one UART conveniently accessible on
> our non-Openmoko targets.  But it will be a non-trivial feature to
> implement, and will probably involve a lot of quite invasive digging
> in the guts of TI's ACI code.  Right now we have code that is almost
> certainly broken in several places, and it seems much saner to me to
> make it work the same as TCS211 first (two UARTs), and *then* do the
> surgery for AT-over-RVTMUX.  Doing it the other way around seems
> insane to me: when we've got broken code, we need to fix it first, not
> break it further!

So I actually have soldered the secondary UART on both my C118 and another
C139 target, currently it provides a RVTMUX output when starting the stock
firmware, but it should be usable as a standard AT interface as well.
However I can imagine not everyone will want to perform this modification
(not easy to do, because of the two shields facing each other). I totally
agree though, it's best to start with fixing the broken code.

--DS