[Cbe-oss-dev] /dev/psflash problem on PS3 Firmware 3.15

[Declan Malone]

Hi, Geoff.

Pi recently posted here about problems I was having with my PS3
running a custom firmware . Eventually the machine became stuck
in a reboot loop, possibly due to disk problems. You said that you
might be able to help when I went back to the stock 3.15 firmware.

I've since replaced the drive in the machine and re-installed the
original 3.15 firmware.

I mentioned before that I was seeing problems with the ps3-utils
programs. They were failing to find the required magic signatures in
the flash. I still have the same problems even after the rebuild.

I installed your petitboot-based bootloader and copied the contents of
the /dev/psflash device. What I discovered is that the bulk of the
memory is actually reading as blank. In fact, the entire range from
0x40000 to 0xefffff is just zeros.

That obviously explains why your tool is failing to find the magic
signature. But the question is, "why are these areas reading as
blank?". Do you have any idea?

I've also tried several other boot loaders that I know worked before,
but the ps3-flash-util fails on all of them. I also tried the -F
option but it refused to do anything due to the missing signature.

The only thing that's special about my PS3, as far as I can tell, is
that the QA flag is set, since I needed to turn it on to do the
firmware downgrade. Do you think that the QA flag is somehow causing
this problem?

I don't think it's possible that these areas of the flash are actually
blank. For one thing, I'm sure the Game OS wouldn't even run. Also,
when I checked the kernel boot messages, I see:

ps3_system_bus_match:354: dev=8(sb_03), drv=8(ps3flash): match
 -> ps3_system_bus_probe:365: sb_03
 -> dma_sb_region_create:656:
ps3flash sb_03: ps3stor_probe_access:70: 7 accessible regions found.
Only the first one will be used
ps3flash sb_03: First accessible region has index 0 start 0 size 524288

and later:

ps3_system_bus_match:354: dev=6(sb_02), drv=6(ps3disk): match
 -> ps3_system_bus_probe:365: sb_02
 -> dma_sb_region_create:656:
ps3disk sb_02: ps3stor_probe_access:70: 4 accessible regions found.
Only the first one will be used
ps3disk sb_02: First accessible region has index 0 start 0 size 1953525168
ps3disk sb_02: ps3da is a TOSHIBA MQ01ABD100 (953869 MiB total, 953869
MiB for OtherOS)
 ps3da: unknown partition table

If I understand this correctly, the vflash table is included in that
(256Mb) block of flash that's reporting as being blank when accessed
by /dev/ps3flash. And yet, during the kernel initialisation, it seems
to have no problem reading that part of the flash and sets up the
/dev/ps3da device.

I'm at a bit of an impasse right now. I'm hoping that it's nothing to
do with the QA flag, since I don't think I can turn it off within the
stock 3.15 firmware. So any ideas you might have would be most
appreciated.

Thanks & regards,
Dec