Ok, cool! I just wanted to double check. You'd be surprised how many people complain about the same thing, only to find that they have constructed crappy cables or using the wrong settings. I already read that thread long ago, as you can see I commented on it, but then there never was any response from OP, so I just assumed that he had screwed up too...thwalker3 wrote:...Read the thread I cited. I know the cable works because I use it on numerous other 3.3V and 5V TTL serial connections) and I know the serial settings are correct (I can see what they are from /proc/cmdline). I do embedded linux programming for a living, I think I'm capable of getting a serial console to work. FWIW- I'm using http://store.ckdevices.com/products/FTDI-Pro.html which are great little devices and have small physical switches to reverse tx/rx and switch between 3.3V and 5V. Takes a lot of the guesswork out of these sorts of things usually.
Yeah, I'm sure the SEC engineers are drooling over this forum so that they can use what's left of their "can't think for themselves" talents to keep us from looking inside our TV's. Anyway, we can solve this. But first I noticed that your TV has a different firmware than mine, so it would be interesting to see how your 1041.1 kernels compares to my 1029. (Different kernel branches. Can you see your kernel compilation date?)Samsung has already clearly modified the the kernel TTY code (to limit input from the serial console) so I don't know why people think it a stretch that they started fiddling with the output too. Given that I can see patterns in the output, they're using a simple rotation or table lookup but I haven't gone digging in the binary yet.
There are two simple things you can try to do.
1. Rollback your firmware until serial works.
2. Save a binary copy of your bootup output and run it through all XOR/ROT/ROL encodings, until you find a string that corresponds to what's expected.
(These are very popular ways to obscure code, but efficient to implement as they are essentially assembly "one liners" and thus hard to spot in reverse engineering.)