During the boot process, the processor reads a file called script.bin, located in the bootloader (nanda) partition. This file contains all of the processor configuration details (such as pin functions, voltages, clock frequencies, memory configuration etc) and is essential to the correct operation of the tablet. The purpose of this file should be distinguished from that of build.prop, located in /system/build.prop. The latter is a configuration for Android, once it's started. script.bin is configuration for the processor.
Note that there is also a file in the bootloader partition called script0.bin - this is a backup and must be identical to script.bin.
For more information on the boot process and the function of script.bin, have a look at these links:
The second link above shows a really neat trick where the pins normally intended for interfacing with the SD card are remapped to a UART port, so you can get a serial port by connecting to the SD card slot!
The script.bin file is actually the binary equivalent of the COMMON_SYS_CONFIG100000 file found in the unpacked Livesuit image. The human-readable version is called a "FEX" file, since that's the extension used by some conversion programs. There are a couple of tools available which can convert between the binary and FEX formats, and these are described below. This - http://linux-sunxi.org/Fex_Guide - is a description of the sections in the FEX file.
(There is an online version of these tools available at https://www.miniand.com/tools/fexc, but I couldn't get it to work.)
To get the tools, go to the git repository at https://github.com/linux-sunxi/sunxi-tools/ and download the ZIP file (called sunxi-tools-master.zip). Extract this, and place the folder on the Desktop of your Linux machine. Open a terminal, cd to the folder, then run
sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
(this installs libusb, which is required for compilation). Then type make which should compile the files. This creates two programs (actually it creates a lot more, but these are the only two we're interested in) called bin2fex and fex2bin.
First, get hold of the script.bin file located in the boot loader partition (do this by mounting either the RFSFAT16_BOOTLOADER_00000 from Livesuit, or the actual partition image from the tablet). Place it on the Desktop of your Ubuntu machine. Then, from a terminal on the Desktop, run
sunxi-tools-master/bin2fex script.bin script.fex
This converts the script.bin file into script.fex. Here's the output produced - script.fex.
To convert back, it's simply the reverse:
sunxi-tools-master/fex2bin script.fex script.bin
This can then be placed back on the bootloader partition (remember to also overwrite script0.bin).
You can use fex2bin to convert the COMMON_SYS_CONFIG100000 file from the unpacked LiveSuit image into a script.bin file. However, I initially got an error saying "E: CONFIG:696: invalid character at 27" or similar (which means line 696, character 27). Looking at the file, it turned out there were quotes missing at a certain point. Here's the original part of the file:
[msc_feature] vendor_name =USB 2.0 product_name =USB Flash Driver
To get it to convert properly, I put quotes as follows:
[msc_feature] vendor_name ="USB 2.0" product_name ="USB Flash Driver"
I'm not sure why quotes were missed out here, since they're present everywhere else.
If you're eagle-eyed, you may notice something at this point. In the unpacked LiveSuit files, there are essentially two copies of script.bin. One is the human-readable COMMON_SYS_CONFIG100000 file, the other is the script.bin located within the RFSFAT16_BOOTLOADER_00000 image file. The two copies are identical (if you use fex2bin/bin2fex to convert between them, and remember the quotation marks). So, which one actually ends up on the tablet?
I made a slight modification to one, then the other, packing and burning a complete LiveSuit image each time, and determined that it's the script.bin inside RFSFAT16_BOOTLOADER_00000 which ends up on the tablet (hardly surprising, since RFSFAT16_BOOTLOADER_00000 is a byte-for-byte copy of the nanda tablet partition). To be on the safe side, I would still ensure that COMMON_SYS_CONFIG100000 is identical to the script.bin file - maybe LiveSuit uses COMMON_SYS_CONFIG100000 for its own initial configuration, or something.