Prime Reverse-Engineering

[debrouxl]

Quote:Is the plan to create alternate s/w to run within the current h/w case?

That's one of the potential applications of reverse-engineering the Prime, indeed.
On raw CPU power, Linux would run faster on the Prime than on the Nspire CX, given that the Prime's CPU is more than twice faster than the Nspire CX's. However, the Prime only has half of the CX's RAM, so some workloads would run worse on the Prime than they do on the Nspire CX.

Quote:I think the h/w and core s/w components (low-level O/S, Prime applications, etc) have been documented,

The S3C2416 SoC is indeed well documented (a year ago, I gathered links on the TI-Planet hpwiki) and supported by Linux.
However, the way devices (component motherboards, USB, etc.) are connected to the SoC is undocumented (that is a prerequisite for porting Linux), and the software is basically completely undocumented, save for a subset of the first 4 KB of BXCBOOT0.BIN (the early boot code), posted some day by an anonymous user, over a year ago.

Quote:so are you proposing to replace the entire s/w stack?

Potentially, yes, though pursuing the baby steps approach, which I prototyped with my crappy armfir.elf PoC which doesn't cooperate with the undocumented host OS, would be an interesting first milestone.