Pandora Shipping In February 2009?

[Chip]

Regarding unbrickable, the Pandora really is. In the event he firmware becomes corrupt, you can always boot off an SD card and reflash the firmware to the current (or a previous) OS release.
That is correct. PCs are essentially "unbrickable" because no matter how badly you screw up the OS, you can always boot from a floppy or CD and recover it. The only way to brick a PC would be to screw up the BIOS. The Pandora doesn't have a BIOS exactly. It does have a boot loader, but it is protected so you're just plain not allowed to screw it up.

 

[Squidge]

Regarding unbrickable, the Pandora really is. In the event he firmware becomes corrupt, you can always boot off an SD card and reflash the firmware to the current (or a previous) OS release.

Although we expect that to be a last resort kinda thing. If you screw up the OS, it should be much easier to get back to a working device. It may be needed if you screwup the kernel however, not sure about that one yet. Maybe we can have a backup kernel that boots if the first one fails it's checksum or something.

 

[Vorporeal]

You could have the backup kernel be a choice in the boot menu (along with SD or whatever), assuming that there is the option to see a boot menu.

 

[God Ginrai]

Regarding unbrickable, the Pandora really is. In the event he firmware becomes corrupt, you can always boot off an SD card and reflash the firmware to the current (or a previous) OS release.
That is correct. PCs are essentially "unbrickable" because no matter how badly you screw up the OS, you can always boot from a floppy or CD and recover it. The only way to brick a PC would be to screw up the BIOS. The Pandora doesn't have a BIOS exactly. It does have a boot loader, but it is protected so you're just plain not allowed to screw it up.


Did Squidge code the bootloader then? Because I remember Squidge said he was coding the BIOS.

-God Ginrai

 

[Squidge]

Did Squidge code the bootloader then? Because I remember Squidge said he was coding the BIOS.

It was decided to use uboot instead as it was more complete and contained a lot of necessary features that would have taken too long to place into my own bios. Plus I have an EVM rather than a Pandora, so someone would have to modify to suit the different hardware.

 

[God Ginrai]

Did Squidge code the bootloader then? Because I remember Squidge said he was coding the BIOS.

It was decided to use uboot instead as it was more complete and contained a lot of necessary features that would have taken too long to place into my own bios. Plus I have an EVM rather than a Pandora, so someone would have to modify to suit the different hardware.

Ah, Got it.

-God Ginrai

 

[Monk]

I'd expect a lot of people - myself in particular - to want to use Pandora in part ot experiment with Linux. Maybe try coding a few things on it... so setting up development environments, adding libraries, all sorts of things that are reasonably likely to end up messing about with the Operating System. To be "unbrickable" would IMHO need the OS (or a version of the OS at least) to be on ROM with some way of forcing it to be flashed to get a clean boot environment. I can see people, reassured byt the "unbrickable" comments, toasting their OS's and then wondering how to get it back if there's no hardware "fix me!" button/key combination.

You mean a way to keep all user modifications to the operating system so that if they screw it up, the system can immediately be reverted back to the factory default? Something like a stackable unification file system?

uh... yes? (luddite, remember! I'm asking now before my Pandora ships)

the likelihood of people only downloading from the Pandora file repository seems quite low to me - this device is designed to be geeky with IMHO... and while some may be happy to run MAME and Finalburn and whatever and little else, I suspect that most of the first batch of users (at least) will be rather more tempted to go beyond the obvious and treat it like an open-ended computing experience rather than JUST a games console.

Who said anything about just games? The repository should (if I understand the plan) contain all the programs you could want to install: games, office and internet apps, system tools, etc... The Angstrom repository is already quite full of programs, many of which should require nothing more than someone making sure it works and then posting it to the official Pandora repository. There's not been a lot of talk about it, but I'm reasonably sure there will be some sort of update process, not unlike the Debian package manager.
That's what I meant by using the official repository. What you need to watch out for is someone showing up on the forum and saying "hey, try this game I've just written." You need to make the judgement call about whether to run the program and risk it being a virus, or wait until someone else has taken that risk and given the OK.

Regarding unbrickable, the Pandora really is. In the event he firmware becomes corrupt, you can always boot off an SD card and reflash the firmware to the current (or a previous) OS release.

Dunno, I certainly didn't say 'just games' AFAICR! But if you're right about the repository being built up to cotnain "practically everything Pandora-compatible" that would be cool.

The picture I had was of some user (probably me!) trying to get to grips with doing stuff he doesn't know how to do yet (we learn by doing) and making the thing unbootable without first creating a "recovery SD", because "unbrickable" seems to be stated so often and uncompromisingly. Me - I'm more likely to be chicken-hearted myself and try to keep decent(ish) backups. Just in case. Personally I'm actually hoping to be booting from SD card leaving the original setup as close to factory default as possible.

I'd imagine (hope?) users are more likely to wreck their Linux installations by trying to port stuff they found at random on the net than from running something someone posts here, but then you just never know, I guess

PCs are essentially "unbrickable" because no matter how badly you screw up the OS, you can always boot from a floppy or CD and recover it. The only way to brick a PC would be to screw up the BIOS. The Pandora doesn't have a BIOS exactly. It does have a boot loader, but it is protected so you're just plain not allowed to screw it up.



I've seen a lot of motherboard BIOS warnings about "don't turn off the system while the BIOS is updating because you will have an expensive brick" in my time (usually worded otherwise). I don't think II ever managed to brick one, but it's been a possibility. Which is why I've been curious as to HOW the Pandora is "unbrickable". Reinstalling an Operating System isn't the nicest thing to have to do, but it's a lot nicer than having to send a unit back to HQ to have a chip swapped out/reprogrmmed (or whatever the GP2X unbricking solutions were).

Excelelnt to know that at some level the most important bit - the bit you can't recreate with just a PC, SD card and Internet connection - is read-only (that's my reading of the above). I have seen "unbrickable" many times but I've never seen it fully explained "how" or "why" it's unbrickable - how a user goes from "Oh My God I've Stuffed it" to "Great! It works again!" (worst case scenario, in other words).

If a user has to create their own backup to make unbricking practical BEFORE they brick it, that doesn't fit my definition of "unbrickable" - that's like all those PCs with no OS floppies or CDs that the user is supposed to burn their own copy of before they do anything - and almost invariably didn't.

You could have the backup kernel be a choice in the boot menu (along with SD or whatever), assuming that there is the option to see a boot menu.

Something like the fairly common "Boot Menu" on PCs? "Press F12 for Boot Menu otherwise I'll try booting in order" and with the Boot Menu up one option is "Restore to Factory Defaults"? That'd work very nicely, I'd have thought - if that's what they've done I'll feel extremely reassurred.


Just to be uber-clear here - I don't want to knock the Pandora, or the OpenPandora Dev team, I'd just like everyone to be clear what is meant by "unbrickable" when it's used. Whether, for example, it means "you can't get your Pandora into a state where it needs to be sent back without physically damaging it" or "you can take preventative measures which will mean you can always rescue it if it all goes horribly wrong".

Neither option I've outlined above (or probably many others) are bad - I'm just so eager for news that even little wrinkles around brickability are of interest. Grief, I'm getting desperate for my andora1: !

 

[emil10001]

Regarding unbrickable, the Pandora really is. In the event he firmware becomes corrupt, you can always boot off an SD card and reflash the firmware to the current (or a previous) OS release.

Although we expect that to be a last resort kinda thing. If you screw up the OS, it should be much easier to get back to a working device. It may be needed if you screwup the kernel however, not sure about that one yet. Maybe we can have a backup kernel that boots if the first one fails it's checksum or something.

I just wanted to mention that it the BeagleBoard team solved this by adding a hardware button that changes the boot order allowing you to boot from SD card or USB instead of NAND. Do we have something similar in case we royally screw something up? (I broke my beagleboard pretty quickly after getting it - and fixed it rather quickly as well =).

http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardRecovery

 

[God Ginrai]

the likelihood of people only downloading from the Pandora file repository seems quite low to me - this device is designed to be geeky with IMHO... and while some may be happy to run MAME and Finalburn and whatever and little else, I suspect that most of the first batch of users (at least) will be rather more tempted to go beyond the obvious and treat it like an open-ended computing experience rather than JUST a games console.

Who said anything about just games? The repository should (if I understand the plan) contain all the programs you could want to install: games, office and internet apps, system tools, etc... The Angstrom repository is already quite full of programs, many of which should require nothing more than someone making sure it works and then posting it to the official Pandora repository. There's not been a lot of talk about it, but I'm reasonably sure there will be some sort of update process, not unlike the Debian package manager.
That's what I meant by using the official repository. What you need to watch out for is someone showing up on the forum and saying "hey, try this game I've just written." You need to make the judgement call about whether to run the program and risk it being a virus, or wait until someone else has taken that risk and given the OK.

Regarding unbrickable, the Pandora really is. In the event he firmware becomes corrupt, you can always boot off an SD card and reflash the firmware to the current (or a previous) OS release.

Dunno, I certainly didn't say 'just games' AFAICR!

The reason WizardStan asked why you said just games is because of the way you worded your post, I believe. To me, it seemed to imply that if people wanted to do things other than gaming, they would have to go somewhere other than the official Pandora repository to get the applications they want.

PCs are essentially "unbrickable" because no matter how badly you screw up the OS, you can always boot from a floppy or CD and recover it. The only way to brick a PC would be to screw up the BIOS. The Pandora doesn't have a BIOS exactly. It does have a boot loader, but it is protected so you're just plain not allowed to screw it up.



I've seen a lot of motherboard BIOS warnings about "don't turn off the system while the BIOS is updating because you will have an expensive brick" in my time (usually worded otherwise). I don't think II ever managed to brick one, but it's been a possibility. Which is why I've been curious as to HOW the Pandora is "unbrickable". Reinstalling an Operating System isn't the nicest thing to have to do, but it's a lot nicer than having to send a unit back to HQ to have a chip swapped out/reprogrmmed (or whatever the GP2X unbricking solutions were).


That's simple. The reason it is unbrickable is because the bootloader itself will never be updated. Only the OS. That way, even if you fuck up your OS during an update, (or some other way) you can always boot off of an image on the SD, thanks to the bootloader.

EDIT:

Regarding unbrickable, the Pandora really is. In the event he firmware becomes corrupt, you can always boot off an SD card and reflash the firmware to the current (or a previous) OS release.

Although we expect that to be a last resort kinda thing. If you screw up the OS, it should be much easier to get back to a working device. It may be needed if you screwup the kernel however, not sure about that one yet. Maybe we can have a backup kernel that boots if the first one fails it's checksum or something.

I just wanted to mention that it the BeagleBoard team solved this by adding a hardware button that changes the boot order allowing you to boot from SD card or USB instead of NAND. Do we have something similar in case we royally screw something up? (I broke my beagleboard pretty quickly after getting it - and fixed it rather quickly as well =).

http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardRecovery


IIRC the Pandora will always check SD first to see if it can boot from SD, before it boots from NAND.

-God Ginrai

 

[Monk]

Dunno, I certainly didn't say 'just games' AFAICR!

The reason WizardStan asked why you said just games is because of the way you worded your post, I believe. To me, it seemed to imply that if people wanted to do things other than gaming, they would have to go somewhere other than the official Pandora repository to get the applications they want.

Ah - I just listed a couple of items that came to mind immediately, and didn't figure "and whatever little else" needed expanding upon to specify "not games" or "not emulation" (I tend to forget that I've not been a VISIBLE part of the GP2X/Pandora community). IIRC both OpenOffice and some Linux WP application have appealed to me, as has a Python development environment (ish). But I rather view it rather like this:

There are likely to be around 3500 units I guess just from the first batch alone. People are incredibly disperate. While I'm looking forward to BBC Micro emulation with a keyboard, others will be looking forward more to Amiga emulation, or MAME, or word processing, or network diagnostics, or web browsing or email (or webmail) or C development or Python game writing or statistical analysis or plastic design theory or circuit design or "media" playing or... it seems to me that if we have 3500 units out there (taking into account a few hundred for losses of one sort or another) then we're likely to have about 3500 different configurations. Each of those is quite likely to have only a few applications, it seems to me, as people pick and choose what suits THEM, specifically - unlike the comparatively constrained GP2X consoles (really, just adding the keyboard and better USB should make SUCH a difference - never mind the rest!). Imagining what the vast array of Linux software "out there" must be like - even ignoring any closed-source stuff - I thought it quite likely that the end users would be hungry to try out things that the Pandora file repository simply wouldn't have... and that this would only increase when a second batch goes out.

I was picturing the file repository a bit like the shelves of software at a store, I guess - perhaps a wide range but still incredibly limited compared to the sum total of what's avaialble on the Internet (even just limiting myself to legitimate, not-malware-at-all but also not-specifically-ported-to-the-pandora [yet?]). And picturing what COULD happen - worst case scenario - when you give a great big open opportunity to people who've never had that much freedom before.

That's simple. The reason it is unbrickable is because the bootloader itself will never be updated. Only the OS. That way, even if you fuck up your OS during an update, (or some other way) you can always boot off of an image on the SD, thanks to the bootloader

....

IIRC the Pandora will always check SD first to see if it can boot from SD, before it boots from NAND.

OK - having a boot sequence in that kind of order (SD card first) would make things easy, and as long as the user has made an SD to boot from should be difficult to brick. Unless we can make boot images with our PCs though that bootable SD card is IMHO a "must-have" and a "must be clear". I mean - we live in a world where things like superglue come with warning labels telling users "not to be taken internally" and coffee from vending machines or coffee houses that has "careful - HOT!" on the mug. I'd hate us to progress any further down that path than we already have, but the apparent "Oh, it's unbrickable" comments just sent up a red flag of apparent nonchalance that seemed almost blasé, without my seeing how or why it was so


Apologies to anyone whose feathers may have felt ruffled

 

[God Ginrai]

That's simple. The reason it is unbrickable is because the bootloader itself will never be updated. Only the OS. That way, even if you fuck up your OS during an update, (or some other way) you can always boot off of an image on the SD, thanks to the bootloader

....

IIRC the Pandora will always check SD first to see if it can boot from SD, before it boots from NAND.

OK - having a boot sequence in that kind of order (SD card first) would make things easy, and as long as the user has made an SD to boot from should be difficult to brick. Unless we can make boot images with our PCs though that bootable SD card is IMHO a "must-have" and a "must be clear". I mean - we live in a world where things like superglue come with warning labels telling users "not to be taken internally" and coffee from vending machines or coffee houses that has "careful - HOT!" on the mug. I'd hate us to progress any further down that path than we already have, but the apparent "Oh, it's unbrickable" comments just sent up a red flag of apparent nonchalance that seemed almost blasé, without my seeing how or why it was so


Apologies to anyone whose feathers may have felt ruffled


Booting from SD is not like booting from CD. You don't have to go through any special burning process. You put the ISO on your SD card, plug it in your Pandora, the Pandora checks for the existance of an image on the SD card, it finds the ISO, and then proceeds to boot it.

-God Ginrai

 

[Monk]

Booting from SD is not like booting from CD. You don't have to go through any special burning process. You put the ISO on your SD card, plug it in your Pandora, the Pandora checks for the existance of an image on the SD card, it finds the ISO, and then proceeds to boot it.

Yes. Where does the ISO come from, please?

 

[God Ginrai]

Booting from SD is not like booting from CD. You don't have to go through any special burning process. You put the ISO on your SD card, plug it in your Pandora, the Pandora checks for the existance of an image on the SD card, it finds the ISO, and then proceeds to boot it.

Yes. Where does the ISO come from, please?


No doubt you should be able to download it straight from the archive.

-God Ginrai

 

[Squidge]

Hopefully, you will only need to boot from an SD card if a kernel or (secondary) bootloader upgrade fails during upgrade (eg. the equivalent of a bios flash on a PC failing). If you just screw up the OS whilst playing, it should be possible to recover without using a sd card (button combo whilst booting).

I don't think the Pandora will attempt to boot from SD card by default as it would slow down the booting process - it will only attempt to boot from SD card if a button combination is held during bootup.

As for the recovery SD, it will be a simple matter of downloading the current (or previous, or later) firmware from the archive with your PC, Pandora, or anything else that can both read/write SD cards and access the Internet and copy the files to the SD card.

The primary bootloader is held in ROM, so can not be modified, so the firmware upgrade/restore will always be available regardless.

 

[quartercast]

Blahblahblah, Pandora blahblah shipping blahblahblahblah Feb blah 2009, blahblah bootloader.

 

[bzar]

Blahblahblah, Pandora blahblah shipping blahblahblahblah Feb blah 2009, blahblah bootloader.

Yes, the topic is drifting. However, the conversation is good.

 

[Monk]

Hopefully, you will only need to boot from an SD card if a kernel or (secondary) bootloader upgrade fails during upgrade (eg. the equivalent of a bios flash on a PC failing). If you just screw up the OS whilst playing, it should be possible to recover without using a sd card (button combo whilst booting).

That would be excellent IMHO

I don't think the Pandora will attempt to boot from SD card by default as it would slow down the booting process - it will only attempt to boot from SD card if a button combination is held during bootup.

Should be workable (I think a number of people are planning to always boot from SD on the basis that SD is (or can be, with the right card) faster than the built-in NAND).

As for the recovery SD, it will be a simple matter of downloading the current (or previous, or later) firmware from the archive with your PC, Pandora, or anything else that can both read/write SD cards and access the Internet and copy the files to the SD card.

The primary bootloader is held in ROM, so can not be modified, so the firmware upgrade/restore will always be available regardless.

So no requirement to actually use the Pandora to create a get-out-of-jail situation before "Something Bad Happens".

Thanks to everyone for the help - especially to someone who hasn't been especially visible to date

 

[kuru]

QUOTE
Anywho, this is a bad analogy, as it equates owning a Pandora with never having sex. Then again, maybe it's not so far off after all.

I lol'd
^_^

 

[aq21]

I don't think the Pandora will attempt to boot from SD card by default as it would slow down the booting process - it will only attempt to boot from SD card if a button combination is held during bootup.

I hope this decision is not set in stone (or silicon) yet. SD is faster than internal NAND and bigger than internal NAND, so no multiple partitions needed if you need the size. From my experience on Nokia N800 and N810, I do want to boot from SD by default.

The slowing of the boot process can be handled in a few ways. Ideas:

- Have a "Pandora autoboot SD" signature in some unused bytes in the first sector of SD. This way the bootloader only needs to read one sector of the SD before booting from NAND if that is desired.

- Have a flag in the NAND that tells the bootloader "try SD first".

 

[RajTakhar]