Quote:
Originally Posted by Poetcop
This is wonderful work geekmaster, which sounds like an answer to two of the most pressing questions for me as a Kindle owner: 1) will amazon be able to permanently lock my kindle away from me? and 2) will I ever be able to unbrick my badly bricked Kindle? You work on the fundamentals, and you share your knowledge (also thinking of the other thread where you gave me some great hints), which makes you a sterling member of the community.
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For those who may have difficulty reading the full manifesto (to whom English is a secondary language), here are direct answers to those two questions:
1) amazon cannot lock the kindle to prevent us replacing the firmware with custom firmware images. According to my understanding of information in the Freescale iMX50 Reference Manual, once an iMX50 processor is unlocked to allow custom firmware, it cannot be locked again.
2) you can always unbrick a kindle by writing a replacement firmware image to it. See #1 above.
Of course, writing custom firmware requires detailed knowledge of how to control the peripheral devices in the kindle, but because amazon use GPL code in the kindles, we have source code that shows how to control all important devices in our kindles. This could be a very easy project. Yifanlu wants somebody to do it, as documented in the Kindle Touch wiki.
We can take an existing alternate operating system such as android OS and port it to the kindle using information provided by the amazon GPL source code.
We can replace the u-boot bootloader with a modified version (as used in KindleSelectBoot), or with a completely different bootloader. Just for fun, we could include the QEMU x86 emulator into the bootloader and boot a foreign OS, such as MS-DOS or even a stripped-down Windows OS (that can run in 256MB of RAM). On modern processors, this emulated OS would still run faster than the old computers that I grew up with, and old computers could do useful things even back in the old days.
Even though it may be difficult, I recommend reading the entire manifesto in the original post for this thread. It will be worth the effort to expand you knowledge in this area.
We are limited only by our imagination and the amount of personal time and energy that we wish to invest in this "kindle hacking" hobby.