[pvrusb2] Completely New fwextract.pl
Joel Mayer
joelm_audion at msn.com
Sun Nov 8 12:13:54 CST 2009
Mister Isely-
Will your new version of fwextract.pl install itself?
I have the old version on my SuSE Linux 11.1
desktop but cannot figure out how to install
it.
Thanks / Joel Mayer
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Today's Topics:
1. Completely new fwextract.pl coming... (Mike Isely)
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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2009 16:31:40 -0600 (CST)
From: Mike Isely <isely at isely.net<mailto:isely at isely.net>>
Subject: [pvrusb2] Completely new fwextract.pl coming...
To: pvrusb2 at isely.net<mailto:pvrusb2 at isely.net>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0911071610000.5514 at ivanova.isely.net<mailto:alpine.DEB.1.10.0911071610000.5514 at ivanova.isely.net>>
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All:
Just thought I'd drop a note that I'm preparing a rewritten
fwextract.pl. New features include:
* Native recognition of "naked" firmware files. There will no longer be
any need to train it in order to locate firmware image files "hiding in
plain sight" within a collection of files. The net effect is that
fwextract.pl will find those files and pull them up, named appropriately
for their purpose. This means for example that now you can simply pull
all the files from Steve Toth's page, blindly run fwextract.pl on it,
and you'll get back a properly named set of firmware files for use with
the pvrusb2 driver.
* Configuration data is now line-oriented text. Previously fwextract.pl
held firmware configuration data as a Perl data structure. Now it's a
series of text records.
* Configuration data is simply appended to the end of fwextract.pl.
Previously after "training" fwextract.pl one had to edit the source file
and paste in the new records into its internal structure. No more. Now
all one has to do is this:
echo >>fwextract.pl
and then just mouse-paste the lines and hit Ctrl-D (ends the echo
command). That's it!
* Merging of configuration data. What this means is that if the
training process finds stuff that it already knows about, it won't emit
out any new records for that data. Instead it will only emit just
enough data to represent the "new" information that it has learned.
* Completely generic - the program is no longer hardcoded for the
pvrusb2 driver. All knowledge of the binary firmware, including file
names, text descriptions, and locations is represented now as block of
configuration data. This, if there is interest, makes this program
usable for anyone's extraction needs.
* A new --inventory option - run this and the program will dump out a
concise summary of its configuration database. (Useful for a developer
to see what it knows about.)
* A new --exportDatabase option - this takes a file name argument.
When run it will write that file with the configuration database. Run
this after --search and the new database will also include the new
information learned from the training process. If the file has ".db"
for a suffix, the data written will be a Perl structure. Otherwise it
will be simple text configuration records - you can use that data to
edit fwextract.pl and replace the internal configuration data appended
to the end of the program.
* A new --importDatabase option - this takes a file name argument and
uses that as its configuration database, substituting for whatever might
have already been in the program. Data format is the same as what is
written by --exportDatabase. This means you could also do the full
training process like this:
fwextract.pl --search --exportDatabase=modified.txt
fwextract.pl --importDatabase=modified.txt
That writes the full database, with new records, to modified.txt, then
you can use that database to extract the final firmware.
* Self-training - I have an idea in mind that should make it possible to
train fwextract.pl on new driver packages withOUT the need for the
firmware to be manually extracted first. This trick will only work if
the firmware data hasn't changed (which is frequently the case). If new
firmware data has been embedded, a manual extraction is still needed to
provide the search samples for the training process. This trick will
work by using the internal database basically as the search set.
Will all of the above, the basic operation of the program has not
changed. All of the old behaviors still work as before. If you run it
with no options, it will do as it has always done - scan all files for
known firmware and extract it. If you run it with --search then it will
perform a search and print out what it finds (but the data will be in
the new, far more compact form).
I'm still doing a bunch of tweaks and fixes. All but the last have been
implemented and already work. Hopefully tomorrow I can make this
available. I'd appreciate it if people here could then play with it and
let me know of any problems. The net effect of all this is that
fwextract.pl should be even smarter now and for the common cases it
should be even easier.
-Mike
--
Mike Isely
isely @ isely (dot) net
PGP: 03 54 43 4D 75 E5 CC 92 71 16 01 E2 B5 F5 C1 E8
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