Re: [Sugar-devel] Announce: OLPC software strategy.
On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 3:49 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: What about the compiler? IIUC currently a commercial compiler is required. If that continues to be the case (as I expect it to), would it be possible for OLPC to provide the (probably very few) users interested in hacking on the EC code access to a machine having this compiler installed? I.e. does the license OLPC has for this compiler allow more than one user (on the same machine) to use it (if necessary sequentially, ensured by using a lock file) and would OLPC be willing to give users access to such a machine? Good news here too: we've moved to the free SDCC compiler, so there should be no problem here. I don't know full details, but there have been some incompatibilities seen between SDCC and the EC code in the past, so staying with SDCC is going to be conditional on being able to find a way around those. SDCC is the plan, though. For more questions, I think we should move to the OLPC devel list, and I'll let Richard Smith answer because this is his project. :) If I understand correctly, the biggest problem is that SDCC lets you reserve a variable at a specific address, but that *doesn't* prevent it from using that address for its own automatically-allocated variables. This is probably just a linker issue, to detect the overlapping address assignments -- although if you wanted the compiler to allocate with holes, that's a compiler issue. The SDCC source code is very hackable. This might be something a volunteer could address at the compiler level. The alternative is to very very very carefully read through the legacy EC code to try to ferret out (and somehow correct) any such conflicts. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Announce: OLPC software strategy.
Hi Chris, Well done to the team for all the hard work! Now that the 10.1.1 release for XO-1.5 is out, it's a good time to talk about OLPC's software strategy for the future. We've got a few announcements to make: XO-1: = OLPC wasn't planning to make a Fedora 11 release of the XO-1 OS, but a group of volunteers including Steven Parrish, Bernie Innocenti, Paraguay Educa and Daniel Drake stepped up and produced Fedora 11 XO-1 builds that follow the OLPC 10.1.1 work. I'm happy to announce that we're planning on releasing an OLPC-signed version of that work, and that this release will happen alongside the next XO-1.5 point release in the coming weeks. So, OLPC release 10.1.2 will be available for both XO-1 and XO-1.5 at the same time, and will contain Sugar 0.84, GNOME 2.26 and Fedora 11. We think that offering this fully interoperable software stack between XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops will greatly aid deployments, and we're very thankful to everyone who has enabled us to be able to turn this XO-1 work into a supported release! Excellent news! To prepare for this XO-1 release, we've started working on fixing some of the remaining bugs in the community F11/XO-1 builds. Paul Fox recently solved a problem with suspend/resume and wifi in the F11/XO-1 kernel, which was the largest blocker for a supported release. We'll continue to work on the remaining bugs, particularly the ones that OLPC is uniquely positioned to help with. The first development builds for this release will be published later this week. XO-1.5: === We'll be continuing to work on XO-1.5 improvements, incorporating fixes to the Known Problems section of the 10.1.1 release notes¹ into the 10.1.2 release. Now that the major release is out what are the plans for upstreaming the kernel and other changes for both the XO-1.5 as well as the remaining bits for the XO-1? XO-1.75 and beyond: === XO-1.75 software development is underway. Today we're announcing that we're planning on using Fedora as the base distribution for the XO-1.75. This wasn't an obvious decision -- ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, and so we're committing to help out with that port. Our reasons for choosing Fedora even though ARM work is needed were that we don't want to force our deployments to learn a new distribution and re-write any customizations they've written, we want to reuse the packaging work that's already been done in Fedora for OLPC and Sugar packages, and we want to continue our collaboration with the Fedora community who we're getting to know and work with well. We've started to help with Fedora ARM by adding five new build machines (lent to OLPC by Marvell; thanks!) to the Fedora ARM koji build farm, and we have Fedora 12 and Sugar 0.86 running on early 1.75 development boards. We'd prefer to use Fedora 13 for the XO-1.75, but it hasn't been built for ARM yet -- if anyone's interested in helping out with this or other Fedora ARM work, please check out the Fedora ARM page on the Fedora Wiki². We're also interested in hiring ARM and Fedora developers to help with this; if you're interested in learning more, please send an e-mail to jobs-engineer...@laptop.org. Very interested in helping out, pushing builds etc through koji so let me know what needs attention and I'll help out where I can. We'll also be continuing to use Open Firmware on the XO-1.75, and Mitch Bradley has an ARM port of OFW running on our development boards already. EC-1.75 open source EC code: OLPC is proud to announce that the XO-1.75 embedded controller will have an open codebase (with a small exception, see below). After much behind-the-scenes effort, EnE has agreed to provide us with a public version of the KB3930 datasheet and is allowing our new code to be made public. The code is not available yet due to a few chunks of proprietary code that need to be purged and some other reformatting. A much more detailed announcement will be provided once the new code is pushed to a public repository. The code will be licensed under the GPL with a special exception for OLPC use. The exception is because EnE has not released the low-level details on the PS/2 interface in the KB3930, so there will be some code that is not available -- relative to the codebase this is a very small amount of code. The GPL licensing exception will allow for linking against this closed code. We're going to investigate ways to move away from this code in the future. (As far as we're aware, this will make the XO-1.75 the first laptop with open embedded controller code!) Multi-touch Sugar: == We've begun working on modifications to Sugar to enable touchscreen and multitouch use (the XO-1.75 will have a touchscreen, as will future OLPC tablets based on its design), and we'll continue to do so. The first outcome from this work is Sayamindu
Re: [Sugar-devel] Announce: OLPC software strategy.
Chris, thanks a lot for the extensive (and exciting!) updates and information, much appreciated:-) Cheers, Christoph Am 08.07.2010 um 00:01 schrieb Chris Ball c...@laptop.org: Hi, Now that the 10.1.1 release for XO-1.5 is out, it's a good time to talk about OLPC's software strategy for the future. We've got a few announcements to make: XO-1: = OLPC wasn't planning to make a Fedora 11 release of the XO-1 OS, but a group of volunteers including Steven Parrish, Bernie Innocenti, Paraguay Educa and Daniel Drake stepped up and produced Fedora 11 XO-1 builds that follow the OLPC 10.1.1 work. I'm happy to announce that we're planning on releasing an OLPC-signed version of that work, and that this release will happen alongside the next XO-1.5 point release in the coming weeks. So, OLPC release 10.1.2 will be available for both XO-1 and XO-1.5 at the same time, and will contain Sugar 0.84, GNOME 2.26 and Fedora 11. We think that offering this fully interoperable software stack between XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops will greatly aid deployments, and we're very thankful to everyone who has enabled us to be able to turn this XO-1 work into a supported release! To prepare for this XO-1 release, we've started working on fixing some of the remaining bugs in the community F11/XO-1 builds. Paul Fox recently solved a problem with suspend/resume and wifi in the F11/XO-1 kernel, which was the largest blocker for a supported release. We'll continue to work on the remaining bugs, particularly the ones that OLPC is uniquely positioned to help with. The first development builds for this release will be published later this week. XO-1.5: === We'll be continuing to work on XO-1.5 improvements, incorporating fixes to the Known Problems section of the 10.1.1 release notes¹ into the 10.1.2 release. XO-1.75 and beyond: === XO-1.75 software development is underway. Today we're announcing that we're planning on using Fedora as the base distribution for the XO-1.75. This wasn't an obvious decision -- ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, and so we're committing to help out with that port. Our reasons for choosing Fedora even though ARM work is needed were that we don't want to force our deployments to learn a new distribution and re-write any customizations they've written, we want to reuse the packaging work that's already been done in Fedora for OLPC and Sugar packages, and we want to continue our collaboration with the Fedora community who we're getting to know and work with well. We've started to help with Fedora ARM by adding five new build machines (lent to OLPC by Marvell; thanks!) to the Fedora ARM koji build farm, and we have Fedora 12 and Sugar 0.86 running on early 1.75 development boards. We'd prefer to use Fedora 13 for the XO-1.75, but it hasn't been built for ARM yet -- if anyone's interested in helping out with this or other Fedora ARM work, please check out the Fedora ARM page on the Fedora Wiki². We're also interested in hiring ARM a nd Fedora developers to help with this; if you're interested in learning more, please send an e-mail to jobs-engineer...@laptop.org. We'll also be continuing to use Open Firmware on the XO-1.75, and Mitch Bradley has an ARM port of OFW running on our development boards already. EC-1.75 open source EC code: OLPC is proud to announce that the XO-1.75 embedded controller will have an open codebase (with a small exception, see below). After much behind-the-scenes effort, EnE has agreed to provide us with a public version of the KB3930 datasheet and is allowing our new code to be made public. The code is not available yet due to a few chunks of proprietary code that need to be purged and some other reformatting. A much more detailed announcement will be provided once the new code is pushed to a public repository. The code will be licensed under the GPL with a special exception for OLPC use. The exception is because EnE has not released the low-level details on the PS/2 interface in the KB3930, so there will be some code that is not available -- relative to the codebase this is a very small amount of code. The GPL licensing exception will allow for linking against this closed code. We're going to investigate ways to move away from this code in the future. (As far as we're aware, this will make the XO-1.75 the first laptop with open embedded controller code!) Multi-touch Sugar: == We've begun working on modifications to Sugar to enable touchscreen and multitouch use (the XO-1.75 will have a touchscreen, as will future OLPC tablets based on its design), and we'll continue to do so. The first outcome from this work is Sayamindu Dasgupta's port of the Meego Virtual Keyboard³ to Sugar -- you can see a screencast of it in action here⁴. It's an exciting time for software development at OLPC. Many thanks for
