Thanks *very much* for these explanations. I hope this kind of information can find its way through the OLPC blog, maybe with a little more context. Then we can fight the FUD by linking to these explanations.
Coyping sj, as I think he's responsible for OLPC's blog, but I might be wrong about this. Mitch Bradley <w...@laptop.org> writes: >> >> Now AFAIK, there's little to no Windows work being done in-house by >> the OLPC team, and it's all or mostly at Microsoft's side that the >> work's being done. >> > > At the moment, OLPC is doing approximately zero work on Windows. That > wasn't true last year. I spent several months last year making it > possible to boot Windows from Open Firmware. The reason I did that was > to prevent Microsoft from "taking over" the XO machine. Their plan was > to purchase machines and instruct the factory to reflash their SPI FLASH > boot ROM with a conventional BIOS - which would have prevented OLPC's > Linux from working. It would have been possible to boot a different > Linux distro from that BIOS, but it would not have been bootable from > NAND FLASH, the OLPC security would not have been available, OLPC's > special power management would not have worked, and the OFW-resident > management features like diagnostics and NAND update would have been > lost. Essentially it would have been a one-way ticket to Microsoft land. > > That one-way road was unacceptable to Nicholas. He insisted that, if > any machines were to be able to run Windows, they must be able to dual-boot. > > Microsoft already had the one-way solution working, with only the barest > amount of involvement from the OLPC team - essentially, I answered a few > questions that Microsoft's rep posed to me. The time I spent doing that > was comparable to the time I spent answering similar questions from > people porting other operating systems, such as Minix, Plan 9, and ReactOS. > > The big chunks of time that I spent on Microsoft-related stuff were not > to make Windows run on the XO - that was already a done deal. I spent > the time to enable OFW to dual-boot Windows and Linux, thus preventing > "Windows only" XOs. > > That work paid off in another way for XO-1.5. The ACPI infrastructure > necessary to run Windows on XO-1 let us to use a more "standard" Linux > kernel for XO-1.5. That's good in that it helps our chances of meeting > our tight schedule with our modest system software resources, and > reduces the amount of upstream merging that we must do. It's bad from > the standpoint that XO-1.5 is looking more and more like a conventional > PC, thus bringing it dangerously close to the "black hole" of the PC > industry that sucks everything into the commodity ecosystem in which > Intel has near-total control over the evolution of the system architecture. > > It's possible - even likely - that I will have to spend some time in the > next few months to make Windows boot on XO-1.5. I expect that will go > quite quickly compared to the last effort, as the XO-1 work should carry > over. > > Mitch > > _______________________________________________ > Devel mailing list > Devel@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel > -- Bastien _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel