Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion
new iRiver H100, H120, H300 V8 bootloaders released
braewoods:
Greetings. I have spent the last month finishing up the development of the H1x0 and H300 bootloaders in order to release new production bootloaders for them. Surprisingly this hasn't been done in nearly 15 years even though they could have used the unreleased bug fixes. Here is a summary of the known changes:
H1x0 & H300:
- Various fixes for modern Compact Flash cards
- Various fixes for compatible remotes
- Can boot from original firmware in an emergency
- Can replace original firmware if desired
- Can boot rockbox from RAM / ROM
- Can store some bootloader settings in EEPROM
- Can boot from ROM rockbox image in an emergency
H300:
- Powers on from RTC alarm
- Powers on when AC or USB is connected
- Has a charging screen now
- Charges from USB when in disk mode
I expect the new bootloaders will not be released to the main website until a new rbutil is released but for now you can find them here as an attachment: https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IriverBoot
Also, for now the only way to install them is via the iriver_flash plugin from a recent development build. This is also the utility that can flash RAM/ROM rockbox firmware images to the internal ROM but doing so will replace the OF. However you can still reflash the OF from a ROM dump produced from the debug menu or from a decoded binary of the OF flash image.
LambdaCalculus:
This is pretty damn good news to hear! I just want to confirm a couple of things first, before I go risking wrecking anything (oh yeah, also want to note that I was a Rockbox dev back in the olden days):
1) As far as I still remember, the iriver_flash plugin was only built for the H100 series. I have an H300, but it looks like iriver_flash is available for the H300 now?
2) Will a future H300 bootloader release finally allow installing Rockbox as a full-on replacement for the OF?
braewoods:
--- Quote from: LambdaCalculus on November 17, 2020, 11:33:03 AM ---1) As far as I still remember, the iriver_flash plugin was only built for the H100 series. I have an H300, but it looks like iriver_flash is available for the H300 now?
--- End quote ---
That was one of the first things I did. I ended up having to completely refactor and review the old iriver_flash code in order to ensure it would be compatible with both the H100 and H300 series iRiver devices. It was designed for the H100 series only originally and so it had made a number of assumptions that would have caused it to fail on the H300 series. So yes, it is available for the H300 series now but only in the latest development builds.
--- Quote from: LambdaCalculus on November 17, 2020, 11:33:03 AM ---2) Will a future H300 bootloader release finally allow installing Rockbox as a full-on replacement for the OF?
--- End quote ---
It already does in both this V8 bootloader and any built from the latest development sources. But it wasn't easy to get there. I had to port iriver_flash to the H300 first and also update various parts of the firmware code to support the H300's larger ROM chip as they made assumptions that were only true for the more common 2 megabyte ROM chips. I think the H300 is the only coldfire target with a 4 megabyte ROM chip.
I also discovered that the H300 bootloader was broken and I had to trace it all the way back to the commit that originally broke it in late 2009. Thankfully the reset cookie was still working so I was able to recover from the bad bootloaders by triggering it on purpose to boot the OF. Without that I wouldn't have been able to trace the issue and ultimately fix it. There was also another issue that broke it but I was able to find a solution thanks to Bilgus.
After that I went to work porting over the features of the H100 series bootloader to the H300 series bootloader that were compatible with it. The main feature is the failsafe menu that allows you to choose whether to boot from disk, the rom image, or the ram image. You can also choose to make a default selection that will be chosen the next time you start the bootloader. This should work the same as the H100 series version that was in the pre-release versions of the V7 bootloader.
Edit: I just realized that you may have meant storing the entire rockbox installation in ROM? I don't think that's possible nor is it planned. You can only embed the rockbox core image in the ROM. There's not enough room to store all of it. The rest of the files are still loaded from disk.
LambdaCalculus:
--- Quote from: braewoods on November 17, 2020, 12:13:27 PM ---Edit: I just realized that you may have meant storing the entire rockbox installation in ROM? I don't think that's possible nor is it planned. You can only embed the rockbox core image in the ROM. There's not enough room to store all of it. The rest of the files are still loaded from disk.
--- End quote ---
My bad, I should've worded that a little better. I was indeed thinking of how the old Archos devices had the Rombox option (flash the Rockbox core image to ROM to speed boot times; the rest of Rockbox is on the HDD as normal), and if that was a possibility now with the H300, as I remember the H100 had the option as well.
Thanks for your contributions to the iriver bootloaders and making them much more viable and capable!
saanaito:
Awesome work! I look forward to updating my H320 tonight. ;D
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