Copying to SD and rebooting is now the slowest part of the loop. Z in the
test app pulls a new .dol over the adapter and launches it.
Deliberately NOT built on an IP stack. Frames carry a private ethertype
(0x88B5, IEEE 802 local experimental 1) and a 12-byte header, so there is no
ARP, no IP, no checksums, and no libogc network driver competing with our raw
driver for the EXI channel. It reuses exactly the two paths the suite already
proves on hardware: bba_tx_bytes() for TX and the SPRAM ring at RRP for RX.
A side benefit is that each update is a few hundred round trips through that
path -- a soak test we did not have.
STOP-AND-WAIT is load-bearing, not laziness. The gateware does not consume
RRP, so RXFrameAssembler can overwrite ring pages the GC has not read yet;
there is no overflow protection. One block in flight means the ring never
holds more than one unread frame, so the missing protection cannot bite. Both
the header and the README say not to make this a sliding window without adding
RBFI-style protection first.
Failure behaviour, so a bad update never costs a power cycle:
- 30 s idle with no frames, or 5 s mid-transfer, aborts to the menu rather
than hanging.
- A duplicate block is RE-ACKed rather than ignored, because a duplicate
means our previous ACK was lost and re-ACKing is what lets the host move
on.
- netboot_receive() re-asserts the NCRA SR bit first: an earlier test may
have left receive disabled, and then this would wait forever for frames
the gateware is not storing.
- netboot_launch() refuses an image whose entry point or first text section
is not in MEM1 instead of jumping into a mis-parsed header.
The jump itself is the one unavoidable risk: once sections are copied and
interrupts are off, a bad image hangs the console hard enough to need a power
cycle. The MEM1 check is what stands between a truncated transfer and that.
Host side is scripts/send-dol.py (AF_PACKET, needs sudo). The GC's MAC is
discovered from its first ACK, so neither side needs an address configured.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
libogc's EXI functions return '1 on success, <=0 on error', but every call
site tested '== 0'. A -1 error return therefore read as success, so a failed
EXI_Lock or EXI_Select would fall through and the subsequent transfer would
produce garbage reported as a misleading test failure rather than an EXI
error. All six call sites now test <= 0.
Also retries EXI_Lock for ~100 ms: it fails outright rather than blocking when
another subsystem holds the channel, and Swiss or a libogc driver may hold it
briefly -- without the retry a transient collision surfaces as a test failure.
Builds clean with devkitPPC 16.1.0 / GCC 16, no warnings: 172 KB .dol.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
gc_bba_test/ builds a .dol that drives the adapter over raw EXI from the
console and reports pass/fail per test on the TV, navigable with the pad.
Uses libogc's EXI API against EXI0:2 (Serial Port 1) rather than its bba
network driver: driving the register file directly gives each check its own
verdict, so a failure points at a specific register instead of at
'networking'. Six suites - identity, registers, reset/control, EXI link
integrity (including an EXI clock-index sweep), ethernet TX/RX, SPRAM/DMA
streaming.
Encodes the hardware lessons from bring-up so the app cannot mislead:
* the device ID is a one-shot cleared by the first NCRA reset, so it is
reported SKIP on a re-run rather than FAIL
* TI means the frame reached the W5100, NOT the wire - the TX test says so
* register reads clock exactly the requested length (over-clocking
desynchronises the next transaction)
* TXDATA is written one byte per transaction (eff_addr auto-increments)
.devcontainer/Dockerfile gains the devkitPro gamecube-dev group. devkitPro
publishes no .deb on GitHub, so this uses their installer script against
apt.devkitpro.org -- which is 403 from inside the running container's egress
but reachable from a host-side docker build. Rebuild the container to get it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Roflin