Glo [WIP] Port of Kindle Paperwhite OS

[giorgio130]

Originally Posted by ah-

Ok, with devcap-daemon working the framework seems to start.

The screen stays black, and strace says it waits for a futex, so I guess it requires some other service to start up properly. But I'll investigate that later.

Edit:
After a bit more poking around and especially executing /etc/upstart/firstboot and prereg.conf manually as well as unpacking more cramfs.img from /etc/loopbacktab and setting the framebuffer to 8bit thanks to your framebuffer_configure it now really starts , still with tons of errors but I get a white window and touching the screen results in messages in the log. I see exceptions about missing images, but I haven't found out yet which images are missing and why.

Starting the onscreen keyboard (/usr/bin/kb) leads to the same error and is a lot less complex, so probably investigating that is easier.

Edit 2:
So it seems that this is just what you hinted at in the first posts, the screen update is different. I'm still looking at it, but I suspect awesome (the window manager) to be somehow responsible for it. Starting it pretty much corrupts the display, but upon a closer look the onboard keyboard letters are there in between the corruption.

Edit 3:
And it somewhat works

HEY you are AWESOME!
Great progress in no time! I'd like to help you out but I really have little free time in this period
about this: ipcrm -M 0x00008fb5
how did you find out the correct address? Probably the offset on the Glo could be different. Also, since you're on a touch, maybe it would make more sense to base yourself on the 5.3.2 update for the kindle touch rather than the one for the paperwhite, but maybe you're using it already

[eureka]

Originally Posted by giorgio130

Also, since you're on a touch, maybe it would make more sense to base yourself on the 5.3.2 update for the kindle touch rather than the one for the paperwhite

It makes sense, but (unfortunately for the sake of porting) Kindle Touch updates are differential or incremental updates, not the full rootfs image updates.

[ah-]

Originally Posted by giorgio130

HEY you are AWESOME!
Great progress in no time! I'd like to help you out but I really have little free time in this period
about this: ipcrm -M 0x00008fb5
how did you find out the correct address? Probably the offset on the Glo could be different. Also, since you're on a touch, maybe it would make more sense to base yourself on the 5.3.2 update for the kindle touch rather than the one for the paperwhite, but maybe you're using it already

Yeah I'm using the Paperwhite image, once I get everything to work reasonably well I'm going to start over and document etc., if I can find a good Kindle Touch image I'll try to use it. But until now there weren't that many board-specific changes, so the Paperwhite image works fine.

I got the the shared memory key through strace, but "ipcs" should work as well.

Also, I guess it's time to find a clean way to boot the kindle chroot. At the moment I'm just executing the init files manually, but that's not exactly robust. And unfortunately you can't just start upstart and let it do its thing, it seems to work only as PID 1. So I'm a bit stuck on that issue.

[eureka]

Originally Posted by ah-

if I can find a good Kindle Touch image I'll try to use it.

Kindle Touch images could be found here (mmcblk0p1 is the rootfs partition).

[giorgio130]

Originally Posted by ah-

Also, I guess it's time to find a clean way to boot the kindle chroot. At the moment I'm just executing the init files manually, but that's not exactly robust. And unfortunately you can't just start upstart and let it do its thing, it seems to work only as PID 1. So I'm a bit stuck on that issue.

maybe it would work to run a script during init of the official software. I wouldn't know though how to remove it after testing... it would surely help to have serial access, in order to put together an image that only boots the kindle os.
Right now if I try to start another telnet session while in chroot, connection is refused; probably fixing this would permit to automatically chroot and running upstart at boot, and in case of problems removing that script through ftp/telnet/ssh.

[ah-]

I found a way to hand over to upstart thanks to a nice person in the upstart irc channel, we can just use the Kobo distribution as a kind of initrd, and use pivot_root plus chroot to make the Kindle fs / and start upstart.

Unfortunately I don't have much if any free time after tomorrow, so I'll just post everything I have working up to now.

I got both the 5.1.2 image for the Touch and the 5.3.3 for the Glo somewhat working. The Glo image needed some more tweaks (like manually searching and adding 800x600 images for blanket, plus for the keyboard, and extracting several cramfs images) and doesn't automatically boot into the GUI yet.

Fakeproc.tar.bz2 is a LD_PRELOAD library that can redirect some accesses to /proc/board_id etc. to /fake/proc/board_id if copied to the Kindle fs and put into /etc/ld.so.preload, but it doesn't work with busybox and therefore cat since busybox is statically linked.

The fb_config stuff is used for configuring the framebuffer, run framebuffer_configure once before chrooting to the Kindle fs and fast_update or fast_update_rot to update the screen. I think update_fb is broken, so just ignore that. It depends on the Xorg configuration wether you need the _rot version or not, if you use the wrong one you'll see errors in dmesg.

I modified /etc/init.d/rcS to boot into the Kindle fs when the SD card is inserted during boot or to boot nickel as usual if not. This plus pivot.sh plus the modified Kindle /sbin/init script implements the handover from busybox init to upstart.

The handover kills all running processes, including ssh/telnet. So if you want to connect again, look at the kindle /sbin/init. It might be useful to remove a & at the end of one of the netcat lines to stop the Kobo from rebooting because init died.

There's also a readme.txt i started writing, it's totally incomplete but I don't want this to just sit around and I won't have the time to finish this in the next few weeks.

Be careful about changing mmcblk0 to mmcblk1 everywhere, that's really important. The kindle init scripts like to create new filesystems.

I hope I included everything else I did in the attachment, diff it with against the 5.3.3 initscripts to see what changed.

Random things that might be useful: Use devcap-encrypt to edit /etc/deviceConfig.conf, there's several reboots that have to be uncommented to get it to not reboot after a few seconds, use initctl list/start/stop to talk with upstart, upstart scripts die if there is even one line that doesn't execute successfully (like echo something > /proc/does/not/exist), use tail -f /var/log/messages to get debug output, if the framework doesn't start try executing everything from prereg.conf/firstboot manually in a terminal, use strace on everything that doesn't work as expected, often files/folders are missing and just have to be created with mkdir/touch etc.

What's left to do: Getting it to boot automatically all the way through. Right now it starts only the most basic things, and then requires manual tweaking until it maybe starts X and framework.

Getting things like Wifi to work, maybe writing a wrapper for the eink refresh calls to replace the fb_update scripts, getting the buttons to work and a ton more.

Maybe someone is interested in continuing this, I hope it's at least a bit interesting to look through. With some more work I'm certain that it's possible to get basic reading functionality in a dualboot setup without having to change the Kobo kernel.

Also, I would recommend to start out with an almost empty /etc/upstart and readd things one by one. Really just syslogd, system and dropbear in the beginning and then readd single things while making sure every step works. Else you just get tons of error messages in the logs and have no idea what's going wrong.

[mastnacek]

Hello, is working kindle os in Kobo Mini? And how can i use this in dualboot?

[KevinShort]

I've been having a go at getting this working on my Glo. To get Xorg to start I had to copy the /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules directory from ah-'s debian chroot image to the kindle filesystem. Then X starts just fine after running "initctl start dbus".

When starting /etc/upstart/framework, it first choked on not finding the file /var/local/java/cvm.aot. After I created that file with "touch", the framework gets farther before it spits out this error: "[fake_21d13522] fake_21d13522_ioctl() : unsupported cmd (0x4048462e)" I also get this error when using to initctl to start pillow, splash, and lab126_gui.

I can see a mouse cursor that moves when I touch the screen, and I'm able to get the "kindle tree" splash screen to show. There's a loading bar on the bottom that got a little past halfway loading before it stopped. Have you made any more progress, Giorgio?

[a3nm]

Originally Posted by KevinShort

Awesome, it works! It doesn't fill the whole screen on my Glo, but that can be fixed. Thanks for the little how-to, ah-!

Does anyone know how to fix this? I think the binaries in /fb_update/ would need to be updated to the Kobo Glo's larger screen size, but I couldn't find source code for those anywhere.

(For context: I'm running the Debian image from http://andreas.heider.io, I'm not trying to run any Kindle software, just trying to get the X server to display properly.)

Thanks in advance!

[KevinShort]

You're correct, the binaries just need to be updated for the larger screen size. I've attached the source code and binaries below.

[a3nm]

This worked, thanks a lot!

[kocoman]

Has anyone try on glo hd?. Thx

[Cex]

Originally Posted by kocoman

Has anyone try on glo hd?. Thx

I'm also interested in this working for GloHD. It would be fine if it could use the Regal waveform, I find ghosting from menus and book cover quite annoying. This was solved in Kobo's 1.18, but got back in next version.
It looks like Kobo is unable to release a version without bugs .
Most of my books have been bought on Amazon, so this project looks nice.
Thank you for sharing!

[dnastase]

Originally Posted by KevinShort

You're correct, the binaries just need to be updated for the larger screen size. I've attached the source code and binaries below.

KevinShort, I'm trying to adapt this for the Kobo Aura H2O.
But I don't see where the fb->vinfo is filled in with the screen resolution.
What am I missing ?

Thanks,
Daniel

[imlsj]

Strongly support！！