Rockbox USB - A Long Journey

[Bagder]

The road to get a fully working and enabled mass-storage USB stack in Rockbox has been long and bumpy...

Rockbox USB - A Long Journey

Links to a post on my blog. Enjoy!

[yueonyrl]

A nice and informative account.  An enjoyment to read.

[kadoban]

Nice post.  I've been trying out the recent USB code and haven't had any problems yet.

[ThaCrip]

nice read and gives a basic rundown for us "average joe's"

someone correct me if im wrong... but if i understood you correctly (in the article) unless something acts up, your saying that right now the USB is working reliable enough to make it in the Rockbox v3.2 release? (i.e. March 23rd 2009... im basing this on past releases which have been exactly 3 months apart )

p.s. which portal player is the Sansa e200 series? ... cause i used to know but i cant recall off the top of my head.

[saratoga]

PP5024.

[ThaCrip]

PP5024.

it says...

"the early tests of this are very promising showing the mass storage support to be very close to get supported “out of the box” on the PortalPlayer 5022 based targets now. The PP5020 ones still seem unstable, and we have no support on the PP5002 ones.

If things just proceed this fine, we’ll be able to ship Rockbox’s own USB stack by default in the upcoming 3.2 release!"


so i assume that's a NO? ... or does it mean anything from 5022 or higher is good or just ONLY 5022? (what does run 5022 anyways, is it the c200 series?)

[Chronon]

It's for PP5022 or PP5024. 

After r20032, there's a good chance that Rockbox USB will work nicely on PP5022/PP5024 devices.

[Llorean]

The PP5024 is a PP5022 CPU with an added audio codec, I believe. As well, the PP5021 is treated as a PP5022 and benefits from this as well, if my understanding is correct. What is left out are PP5020 and PP5002 devices.

[ThaCrip]

so in other words.... the Sansa e200 series has full USB support now in the newest builds? (i.e. file transfers etc)

if so, i assume that by the time the v3.2 comes out (about March 23rd 2009) it's a pretty safe bet that if it makes it into that release it will be pretty reliable? (as in tested pretty good by then to the point where there wont be any data corruption etc etc)

[Llorean]

As the changelog says, it's not enabled yet, so no in the newest builds it does not have full USB support. It's there, but it's basically "not turned on yet." There's more or less one last round of tests to go, but they depend on specific hardware.

We'd like to have USB in 3.2,  but there's no guarantee either way and we can't really make predictions. It's impossible to predict whether something unexpected will turn up, and no amount of testing will every guarantee anything, just allow us to say things with a reasonable degree of confidence.

[Chronon]

In case people aren't aware, rasher has posted test builds for affected targets here: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=20664.0

[ThaCrip]

As the changelog says, it's not enabled yet, so no in the newest builds it does not have full USB support. It's there, but it's basically "not turned on yet." There's more or less one last round of tests to go, but they depend on specific hardware.

We'd like to have USB in 3.2,  but there's no guarantee either way and we can't really make predictions. It's impossible to predict whether something unexpected will turn up, and no amount of testing will every guarantee anything, just allow us to say things with a reasonable degree of confidence.

yeah i know no one can give guarantee's, but what i meant which im sure you already knew was with a couple weeks of moderate testing i think would be enough to get a pretty good idea on the overall reliability of the USB support if nothing turns up and then it could be included with v3.2.

but thanks for the information

p.s. assuming nothing turns up and the USB is turned on for v3.2.... would that mean that you could change the bootloader for the e200 series so that instead of it booting the original Sansa firmware when you plug it into the USB port by default which the e200 does when the USB cable is connected when the power is off on e200, it could be changed so that it will boot directly into the Rockbox firmware? (because since charging works and IF the USB works there would be no real need for the original Sansa firmware anymore, right?)

just curious as to your thoughts on that and everyone else etc.

[Llorean]

As I said, yes, we'd like to have USB in 3.2. Once it's in, there should be no reason for automatic reboots into the original firmware but there's no guarantee updated bootloaders will happen immediately (and may come before or after 3.2 as they aren't necessarily related to the release).

[dreamlayers]

Badger, thanks for the blog post.  I see you also have other interesting Rockbox-related posts.

I really like the idea of enabling Rockbox USB by default in 3.2.  However, using the hard drive a lot while not charging over USB (see FS#8802) may be a bad idea because the battery can drain quite quickly.  The situation is probably better on flash-based devices.

I use a USB and FireWire cable (like some of these on Amazon) and connect one end to a FireWire charger and the other end to USB for data.  However, I'm using this because the USB charging functionality of my iPod is broken (I got it that way) and I'm not 100% sure that plugging in both USB and FireWire is ok otherwise.

[LambdaCalculus]

I wouldn't imagine it to be good to plug in both at once. You could possibly blow something out on the mainboard that way, leaving you with a useless iPod (unless you know how to fix it, of course).