Rockbox Development > New Ports
Nano 2G
Llorean:
The Apple chip actually has the number "8701" on it, which according to Samsung's site for decoding the "S5L8701B05" style numbers is the "Serial Number or Function" or something like that (my memory is slightly fuzzy, it was quite a few hours ago I looked there) so my bet is that it is actually the S5L8701B05 chip.
saratoga:
On the upside, the 940 is basically a classic 5 stage RISC processor, so performnace should be a lot better running the same code as the pp chips. It should also clock higher. Additionally, it seems we now have a hardware MAC instruction too, which should be nice for codecs (at least according to the samsung link above).
linuxstb:
I couldn't resist the shiny aluminium case and picked up a 2nd gen Nano today.
On the outside, it appears the same as any other ipod - the usual key combinations all work (MENU+SELECT for reboot, SELECT+PLAY for disk mode, SELECT+LEFT for diagnostics mode), and the disk is organised the same as the previous ipods - a relatively small (100MB) firmware partition, and a FAT32 paritition taking up the rest of the disk with the usual iPod_Control folder.
As an aside, the diagnostics mode features a "line-in recording" test - so it seems Apple have included recording functionality in the new Nano. Although it's not accessible via Apple's firmware...
The firmware partition is very similar to the v1.2 Nano firmware partition - it contains an "osos" image with the main firmware, an "rsrc" image containing the Nike-related files, and an "aupd" update image (this is the image that gets flashed).
For those that don't know the Apple firmware partition layout, details of the previous firmware partitions are in the IPL wiki: http://ipodlinux.org/Firmware
But there are some differences. Firstly, the images are now prefixed with string "DNAN" instead of "!ATA", and secondly both the main firmware and the aupd image appear to be encrypted.
In the PortalPlayer based ipods, the main firmware was unencrypted (but protected by a simple checksum), and only the aupd image was encrypted.
So the first step towards a port would be to understand this encryption - so we can both unencrypt the Apple firmware image for disassembly and also encrypt our own code in order to run it on the ipod.
Bagder:
--- Quote from: linuxstb on September 17, 2006, 07:42:25 PM ---But there are some differences. Firstly, the images are now prefixed with string "DNAN" instead of "!ATA", and secondly both the main firmware and the aupd image appear to be encrypted.
--- End quote ---
A guess is that "NAND" instead of "ATA!" could imply that they don't access the flash using ATA.
iconoclast:
I ordered one of these when they were first announced. From the announcement, it seemed the changes were mostly the case, the battery, and software, so I'd hoped the internals would be similar enough to the first gen nano that rockbox would easily run. Now of course we know that's not the case. Anyway, mine arrived in the mail today, and if there's anything I can do to help out in the porting, please let me know. I don't have any current experience at the sort of low-level coding the firmware folks are doing, but if you still need scans of the internals for example, or something similar, just tell me what you need.
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