[MDA III, XDA III, PDA2k, 9090 ROM Development] gbl08ma:
Hoping not to be too stubborn with asking for new project status, how has the DoC G3 driver been coming? Did you have much time to work on it?

Are you developing all of the bootloader in raw assembly, or is it just some parts that are in assembly (low-level drivers) and the rest is in C? Because if it's all in asm, then it must be a lot of work even to just get text output and the LCD working...

EDIT: at least I can now compile the 3.5 kernel for the BA :laugh: after some hours of work to get the cross-compiler going. Too bad I only have one SD-non-HC card, which I can't format right now. If only there was a way to somehow reset the mmc driver so it forgets the wrong definitions provided by WM to not support SDHC, then I would be able to swap cards after the kernel launches... of course, with PXALoader it would be much easier. But one has got to do it with the current resources :)

EDIT2: The kernel I compiled was having kernel panics after it mounted a ext4 partition. But then I had the crazy idea to pick up the "Kernel" partition available at SourceForge, rename it zImage (since that partition is in fact just a zImage) and boot it with HaRET. Then I took off my 512 MB SD and put in a 8 GB SDHC. Aaand... the kernel recognized this card, it says "new SDHC card" and reports it has 7.41 GiB. Which means WM doesn't break SDHC compatibility, at least not with this kernel. I tested with other cards, for some it says it can't read the partition table but it reads the card size correctly. If this kernel respected the rootdelay option passed by HaRET, I think one could boot Android off a SDHC card by swapping cards during the delay.

EDIT3: So I connected to the BA running this "mystery" kernel using ADB. After reading the init.rc, it looks like it expects to see /system on mmcblk0p2, /data on p3 and cache on p4. I can manually mount /dev/block/mmcblk0p2 on my SDHC cards, and I can read and write them.

Conclusion: we do not need PXA-Loader to have SDHC card support. :D We only need a kernel that supports SDHC from the beginning; the fact that the kernel is booted by WM using Haret or by PXA-Loader is irrelevant. I will conduct more tests and see if I manage to boot Android from a SDHC card using Haret.

Also, d-two, could you pretty pretty please post your kernel .config? Note that I'm not trying to steal your work, well on the contrary, I'm trying to help. And my ultimate goal is not to boot Android but some other Linux-based OS. That's why I'm more excited about PXA-Loader and SDHC support than about Android itself.

EDIT 4: Success booting Android from SDHC! See the pictures:

http://s.lowendshare.com/3/1366553022.17.picture_6.png (in this one you can see kernel version, 3.4.0).

http://s.lowendshare.com/3/1366553817.623.picture_8.png

http://s.lowendshare.com/3/1366553845.963.picture_11.png (internal storage, 3.26 GB)

Unfortunately it isn't very clear, from the storage screens, that it is booting from the SDHC, because I'm using a 8 GB one where 3.26 GB are for the data partition (it's what it calls "Internal Storage). It has the FAT partition mounted as /sdcard but Android doesn't seem to recognize it as the "SD card".

Some sort of SD debug mode is enabled on the kernel, because the kernel log is spammed with messages about MMC IRQ (if there was no kernel spam, the system would be faster. at least that's what happens on my crappy Android tablet).

Graphic animations are bugged (PXA FB problems?).

It can go into some sort of sleep mode which I don't think is true standby (I think it's the low-power mode d-two talked about). It doesn't read the battery information.

Vibration is working. Wifi is not working.

Bluetooth isn't working, trying to enable it caused the BA to hang (even adb wouldn't work).

Didn't try phone but it wouldn't work, because I didn't input the PIN in WM (it looks like the screen wouldn't be correctly initialized when I input the PIN in WM so I gave up).

There is almost no RAM free (seen with 'top' through ADB shell).

Note that these problems may be because I'm using an inadequate Android build (I'm using the Gingerbread one available at the PXADroid Sourceforge).

I'm sure it will be very interesting to see this working with PXALoader. Well, at least now I'm sure my SDHC card works.