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Greetings fellow earthlings,
in my free time I like to take apart electronic devices and see how they are built and how I can re purpose them. Also I think its a bit like digital archaeology. Its fun.
I tried to extract all the information and important things through Android Debug Bridge like:
– NANDA dump (/boot): including a .fex file. Sadly Allwinner did not use device tree files (back then).
– Kernel module (.ko) files for the peripherals.
OEM Firmware:
– U-Boot 2011.09-rc1-00013-g3aa33b0-dirty
– Android 4.0.3
root@android:/ # getprop
[ro.board.platform]: [exDroid]
[ro.build.description]: [PMP5197DULTRA-eng 4.0.3 IML74K 20120819 test-keys]
[ro.build.fingerprint]: [yftech/mw07/mw07:4.0.3/IML74K/20120819:eng/test-keys]
[ro.build.product]: [mw07]
[ro.hardware]: [sun4i]
[ro.product.board]: [crane]
[ro.product.brand]: [yftech]
[ro.product.cpu.abi]: [armeabi-v7a]
sudo sunxi-fel version
AWUSBFEX soc=00001623(A10) 00000001 ver=0001 44 08 scratchpad=00007e00 00000000 00000000
OEM firmware U-Boot output (excerpt): *See messages down below. Discord only allows 2000 chars per post.*
Also I found the debug UART and im able to see U-Boot output and Android startup.
GCC Linaro 4.9.4 toolchain installed to compile the Allwinner sun4i kernel.
Thats how far I have come. Its the first time working so closely with the kernel and compiling it.
How would you tackle this project? What are the big things to watch out for? What are my next steps? What am I unaware of?
If you need more detail, logs, pictures just tell me and I will provide it if possible.
Thank you! 🙂
PS: My goal is to get Linux running on this tablet with as many functioning peripherals as possible. When done I want to do my first write up of all time and post it on the internet, so that I can give something back to our community. Also I want to support some kind of open source project in the future, as open source is our air and water. I think we were nothing without open source.
This is great @lamboing … @abhishek_awasthi_tech can provide insight here
“`U-Boot 2011.09-rc1-00013-g3aa33b0-dirty (Dec 22 2011 – 10:33:19) Allwinner Technology
CPU: A10
Board: A10-EVB
DRAM: 512 MiB
WARNING: Caches not enabled
NAND: 2912 MiB
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
——–fastboot partitions——–
-total partitions:10-
-name- -start- -size-
bootloader : 100000 1000000
env : 1100000 200000
boot : 1300000 2000000
system : 3300000 18000000
data : 1b300000 40000000
misc : 5b300000 100000
recovery : 5b400000 2000000
cache : 5d400000 ff00000
private : 6d300000 100000
UDISK : 6d400000 48c00000
———————————–
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
NAND read: device 0 offset 0x1300000, size 0x2000000
33554432 bytes read: OK
“`
the project seems great … so usually the commercial products block their firmware to accept any new piece of firmware as input which could overwrite thier os … but still you can give a shot … what you require next is a spi nand flashing tool with its build … i personally had never tried this kind of over writing but as its a famous soc you might find many resources …
https://elinux.org/Hack_A10_devices
you may check this and try with livesuit
they have given the image as well .. which you can flash
please let me know as well if it works .. 😊
Thank you very much Abhishek! 🙏 I will process all the information you gave me and will get back to you!
sure buddy … you may please post your journey and results as well on our #self-promotion page 🤟
~HAPPY LEARNING
I will do so, as soon as I have got some presentable results. 🤟
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