CC'ing SJ this time... Bastien <[email protected]> writes:
> 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 <[email protected]> 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 >> [email protected] >> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel >> -- Bastien _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
