Status of TCS211 on C139

[Mychaela Falconia]

Hi DS,

> Once again congratulations on fixing a hard to find bug :) Even though
> the LCD output is not fully working, it's a step in the good direction!

Thanks for the compliment. :)

> About tcs211-c139, I'd like to point out to the list that thanks to the
> already setup wine package, compiling tcs211 is really a walk in the park.

I heard that different people had different experiences with Wine
depending on their host system/distro.  I remember when I first put
leo2moko out, someone tried to compile it and TI's linker vlnk.exe
bombed out with some error (page fault IIRC) which is not very
troubleshoot-able...  Also wine has a habit of emitting obnoxious
whines on stderr, i.e., into the terminal window from which the
environment is run with winebuild.sh; my nowhine hack suppresses those
specific whines which it emits on *my* system, but I dunno what other
whines it will produce on someone else's system...

In any case, the only way to find out is to try - so just brave it!

> Be sure to check out the README file at the top which explains the steps
> in a very straightforward fashion.

Yes, I tried to be thorough. :)

> And of course feel free to ask any
> questions, Mychaela and I will be glad to help :) Compiling and flashing
> tcp211-c139 is in fact at the top of my TODO list!

I'm definitely looking forward to hearing your experience with it, as
well as that of any other adventurous souls.

> I might be looking into
> running it on a C118 as well, which has the benefit of JTAG.

This one may not be possible...  C139 has 256 KiB of IRAM (internal
Calypso RAM) and 512 KiB of XRAM (external RAM on the board), and the
current tcs211-c139 uses almost all of this RAM: the current usage is
0x38c74 bytes of IRAM and 0x792cc bytes of XRAM.  But unless I am
mistaken, C11x and C123 phones have only 256 KiB of XRAM, don't they?

Most of these super-basic phones also have 2 MiB of flash, and the
current tcs211-c139 uses a little over 2.5 MiB.  There are some C118
phones with 4 MiB of flash (same as C139), and DS has one of those,
but what about the XRAM?  If a phone has 512 KiB (or more) of XRAM,
then you should be in business, but I don't see any possible way to
squeeze TCS211 into 256 KiB of XRAM when it already uses almost all of
both IRAM and XRAM on the C139.

If you look at that Mot firmware linker map file we found a while back,
you can see that Mot/Compal seem to have put in a whole ton of work to
customize their fw to their specific needs, and they ripped out a lot
of TI's "standard" stuff.  I'm not sure if we really want to go to
that level of effort to squeeze our fw to fit into 2 MiB of flash
(including FFS) plus 512 KiB total IRAM+XRAM, even when we do reach
the point of fully working functionality in the full-source version:
seems like too much effort to run on ultra-low-end hardware,
considering that C139 phones with a little more memory (just enough
for our needs) are still readily available.

M~