iPod sync/charge speed question

[skyfish]

Hi all,

I'm new to Rockbox and do not yet have the iPod itself, so please pardon if I miss something obvious or well-known.

If I got it right, the current build goes to native disk mode on USB connection. I'm looking for a way to decrease the switch time. I often grab a podcast or two just before to run away, and I suspect the reboot delay would be bothering. How long does it take on 5.5G?

I've noticed there is an interesting patch (#6721), but I would be very grateful for any advice/opinion on the sync speed-up.

[saratoga]

If I got it right, the current build goes to native disk mode on USB connection. I'm looking for a way to decrease the switch time. I often grab a podcast or two just before to run away, and I suspect the reboot delay would be bothering. How long does it take on 5.5G?

I think if you use the current build you just get rockbox USB mode, so you can transfer files quite quickly, although it probably won't charge much.

[torne]

Release builds (such as 3.5) switch to the OF disk mode. This really doesn't take very long, because it doesn't boot the whole OF, just the emergency disk mode in ROM. I don't have the player handy to test it but if I recall correctly it's under five seconds.

Current builds from svn don't switch to the OF disk mode. This obviously eliminates the delay, but actually this means that USB transfers are slower, because we are not as fast as the original firmware at accessing the disk via USB. This also means your iPod will charge extremely slowly, or possibly *discharge*, while plugged in, because we don't draw the right amount of current yet.

[skyfish]

Thank you for the reply, under 5 sec is great, I thought it takes longer.
The author of the FS#6721 (linuxstb) with the RoLo approach must be a code perfectionist then, glad you have people like him on your team.

Upd: Although people in the comments there mention longer loading times.

[torne]

They are talking about it taking longer to copy a new build of rockbox onto the player, not the time to load the disk mode. rockbox.zip contains lots of small files which is something of a "worst case" for USB transfer performance. The Rockbox USB stack, the Apple emergency disk mode, and the actual full Apple firmware, all have different USB transfer performance characteristics and it varies with model and with OF version, which is mostly what's being discussed there.

rolo'ing the disk mode should be doable and will be basically instant, so the improvement is large even if it's not really that slow to reboot into it I suspect it's not been finished because it's tricky to get it to work on every model properly, and in the long run it would be preferable to spend time working on fixing the charging and transfer speed issues so that booting the disk mode is not needed at all

[skyfish]

Thank you for clearing it up, torne, makes sense now.