Introduction

You will find on these pages everything you need to customize the Jobo Giga Vu Pro Evolution device to your needs. You will be able to completely replace the bootloader, kernel and filesystems with your own versions thereby creating cool new applications for this device and share them with the Giga Vu Pro Evolution community!
If you are looking for the SDK for the original Jobo Giga Vu Pro click here.

What is it

The Jobo Giga Vu Pro Evolution is a second generation companion device for professional and enthusiast photographers. It also serves as a portable media player. Of interest for hackers are the internals of this device:

See also the Jobo website for more information.

What you get

Sources

You get the full sources to the kernel, the demo programs as well as a prepackaged barebone filesystem.

Compiler

At some point you will have to compile stuff. For your convenience we prebuilt a GNU C 3.4 MIPS crosscompiler.

Documentation

You're looking at it! We'll jump right in...

Flash Mappings

The table below shows the flash partition table of the Jobo Giga Vu Pro Evolution:

Range Name Upgrade File
0xBE000000-0xBE100000 Configuration upgrade5.dat
0xBE100000-0xBFC00000 R/O Filesystem upgrade2.dat
0xBFC00000-0xBFC40000 Bootloader upgrade4.dat
0xBFC40000-0xBFE00000 Kernel upgrade1.dat
0xBFE00000-0xC0000000 R/W Filesystem upgrade3.dat

What happens when you power up the device is that the Configuration of the device will be read out, after which the Bootloader code will run. This Bootloader will look for an upgrade application on compact flash (the upgrade.bin file) and if it finds it it will execute that file. If it does not find the upgrade application, it will start the Kernel which will then mount the R/O and R/W filesystems. The reason there are two filesystems is that the bigger R/O filesystem is formatted in such a way that it will run faster than the smaller R/W filesystem.

Now, to run your own application you have the option to:

This guide will handle the first option only as that option is totally safe.
It will not be hard to figure out the second option if you know what you are doing and take a look at the contents of the Jobo firmware upgrade images (but be careful not to erase the Configuration and Bootloader part of the flash or you will be left with a brick).

Building Stuff

You can download everything here.

Cross Compiler

The first step is to install the cross compiler. Donwload it from this sourceforge site and untar it in the SDK directory. Cross-compile your application with this compiler.

Filesystem

Download it from the sourceforge site and untar it on your system in the SDK directory.You will now have a barebones filesystem in the SDK/fs directory that you can modify to your needs. Copy your application to the SDK/fs/bin directory and launch it from the SDK/fs/etc/init.d/rc.sysinit startup script. Note that the full size of the fs directory should not exceed 32MB.

Kernel

Download it from the sourceforge site and untar it on your system in the SDK directory. Then type the commands below :

# cd linux-xsilo2
# make xsilo2_sdk_defconfig
# make zImage
# cp arch/mips/boot/compressed/images/zImage.rom ../upgrade.bin

This will produce an image (upgrade.bin) that contains the SDK/fs filesystem and the SDK/linux-xsilo2 kernel all in one compressed file!

Running Stuff

This is the easy part. Copy the SDK/vmlinux.rec file onto a compact flash card, insert it into the device and boot it. Your application should now start!

Contribute

If you have a nice application please share it with us and we will put it on the website for others to play with...

Contact

This project is maintained by Laurent Bousis (lbousis _at_ users.sourceforge.net).

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