Showing posts with label PromDiag. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PromDiag. Show all posts

Saturday, November 28, 2009

My broken SS-5 is just too fast

Few days ago I wrote I have a world's fastest broken SS-5. The problem is that it is so fast that this alone makes it broken.

It looks like at least some PromDiag/POST/OBP tests fail just because qemu doesn't emulate cpu cycle-exact. It can be they wait that an irq would happen while they execute like 100 nops, but qemu nop is much faster than a real one, so an irq comes too late. "nop" is just an example here, I didn't disassemble the tests yet, but it looks very much like it: the timer test passes if I make the timer tick 256 times faster.

Probably the other tests fail due to the same reason. So the OBP timer/irq tests are probably useless.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Hidden OBP feature found

debugging the initial Power-On-Self-Test of OBP 2.29 I found a secret level a cool undocumented feature, PromDiag. Whenever I turn it on, instead of getting a usual OBP "OK" prompt I get:

PromDiag
NOK>

I wonder what is "NOK"? Does it mean "Not OK"? Anyway, I played with it a little. It runed out that it can launch single POST tests, and there are some more features, which have to be discovered yet. All in all it accepts just a few symbols: numbers, dot, comma, c, h, l, q, r, s: