History

Virgil Dupras 95ab1ad588 Transform "blk/" folders into "blk.fs" text files Working in "blk/" folder from a modern system is harder than it should be. Moving blocks around is a bit awkward, grepping is a bit less convenient than it could be, git blame has troubles following, etc. In this commit, we modify blkpack and blkunpack to work with single text files with blocks being separated by a special markup. I think this will make the code significantly more convenient to work into.		2020-11-14 18:34:15 -05:00
..
.gitignore	tools: add smsrom	2020-10-10 13:30:43 -04:00
blkpack.c	Transform "blk/" folders into "blk.fs" text files	2020-11-14 18:34:15 -05:00
blkunpack.c	Transform "blk/" folders into "blk.fs" text files	2020-11-14 18:34:15 -05:00
blkup.c
common.c
common.h
exec.c
Makefile	tools: add smsrom	2020-10-10 13:30:43 -04:00
memdump.c
pingpong.c
README.md
smsrom.c	tools: add smsrom	2020-10-10 13:30:43 -04:00
ttysafe.c
upload.c

README.md

Tools

This folder contains tools to communicate to Collapse OS machines from a modern environment or to manipulate a blkfs.

Communication tools all take a device path as a first argument. That device is the serial device that connects you to your machine. It's often a USB-to-TTL dongle. When - is specified, stdin is used as the device.

Note that for these tools to work well, you need the serial device to be properly set up, TTY-wise. You'll probably want to do that with stty. The tool itself takes care of setting the regular stuff (cs8, -parenb, etc), but you need to set the speed. Here's an example working on OpenBSD:

$ ( stty 115200 raw ; sleep 2 ; ./upload - a000 os.bin ) <> /dev/cuaU0

To be honest, I'm having a bit of troubles making these tools work as well on OpenBSD as they do in Linux. But it does work. Here are some advices:

Use cuaXX instead of ttyXX.
Run cu -l /dev/cuaXX before running your tool and run a dummy command to make sure that the output buffer is flushed.
Use the "raw" option to avoid TTY-processing options to mess with data.
If you experience random failures in your command, try inserting a "sleep 2" between your "stty" invocation and the command. In my experience, these tend to help.

On Linux, it's generally easier:

Run screen on the device (often /dev/ttyUSBX)
Quit with CTRL+A :quit
Run the tool on the same device