OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. B2: Electrical and mechanical improvements that will be part of the B2 build include: CAFE ASIC; DCON running at the proper voltage (lower-power consumption); anti-glare screen; touch-pad fixed; power overcharge and undercharge fixed; keyboard improved (including the space-bar and enter key); new material in bumpers allowing 100cm drop; improved ribbing and strength in housing; less wobble in the hinge; display tilt improved by 3–5 degrees; and buttons do not get stuck in housing and are easier to press.
2. CAFE: The CAFE ASIC is working! Marvell tested all three functions—camera, flash, and SD controllers—with their internal diagnostic software and the ASIC passed basic tests. We also tested CAFE with an AMD Geode board and regular Linux PC. Basic register read/write, data read/write, and DMA transfers all passed.
3. Power management: There has been a concerted effort over the last year toward enabling Linux to stay idle as much of the time as possible to conserve power. One aspect of this are the “tickless” patches, now going into mainline Linux, that eliminates a constant “tick” (traditionally 100hz) for process scheduling in favor of doing all scheduling by computing when next to wake the machine. Linux has been weak in this area relative to other systems. Other aspects are fixing user-space applications that may be doing stupid polling, as pointed out by Dave Jone's “Why user space sucks” talk at OLS last summer (see http://lwn.net/Articles/192214/). David Zeuthen, one of the Red Hat engineers has made major progress on making one of the desktop key components (called “hal”) work well, and we are now able to use it on OLPC.
Marcelo Tosatti, one of the Red Hat OLPC staff has recently made the “tickless” patches work on the Geode. He's now at of order 50 interrupts/second and investigating further. He also cleaned up the USB-EHCI driver to stop polling and become interrupt driven, again reducing wakeup overhead.
4. Drivers: Marcelo also tested v3106 of the Libertas boot2 code, which should fix a number of outstanding USB problems we've observed, and tested the updated Libertas mesh firmware.
Since we have no “legacy” DMA devices on our machine (e.g., floppy drives) Marcelo also prepared a patch to recover the DMA-area memory usage, since all our devices can address all of memory directly.
Andres Salomon worked on the Linux kernel touch-pad driver and testing the new version of the touch pad from ALPS and the EC fix from Quanta that allows us to talk to the device correctly. The two samples we have in Cambridge are working well. He has also been integrating other patches into our system.
5. Firmware: Mitch Bradley has made very good progress on eliminating the need for VSA (virtual systems architecture) that emulates PCI registers on the Geode; Mitch has identified all registers that need to be set up on boot or resume. (While source for VSA is available, it requires obsolete Windows tools to build and is probably unnecessary baggage.) Mitch will start integration of this work into the firmware; we hope to do so in a “step-wise” fashion, so that only one part of the system need change at a time and so we can always do A-B comparisons of the changes in case problems surface along the way.
Richard Smith tested a later version of the EC code in our firmware to fix a battery overcharge problem and has prepared a version of the firmware for the pre-BTest-2 build that will take place next week. With the advent of the CAFE ASIC, we hope to run the PCI bus at 66mhz and some pin-outs have had to change. He has also started going through LinuxBios to audit the POST (power-on self test) codes.
Mitch Bradley and Dave Woodhouse will be in Shanghai next week for the BTest-2 board and CAFE ASIC bring-up.
6. SJ Klein spent some time with Rob Savoye and John Gilmore testing Gnash on the laptops (Gnash is a GNU Flash movie player). They were able to get smooth playback for both flash video and animation. A file used for stress testing that uses over 60M of memory played slowly but without hitches. An activity for Ming (an open-source library used to create SWF-format movies) and Gnash may be ready for the laptops in time for B2.
With a working Flash tool-chain, it will be very easy to script new applications and small games; and many early education tools designed to be cross-platform by working in flash will become available to us. Rob is taking on new staff and looking for interface developers; he wants to give Ming a GUI and to set up a cross-compiling environment for OLPC to help future work.
7. Python: Mamading Ceesay, who has been a long-time advocate of teaching Python to children, has offered to curate a collection of generative Python games. He intends to get Pygames and Childsplay to run on the laptops, and to help others produce tutorials using the games to show children how and why to program.
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MILESTONES
| Dec. 2006 | Uruguay announced its participation in the project. |
| Nov. 2006 | First B1 machines are built; IDB and OLPC formalize an agreement regarding Latin American and Caribbean education. |
| Oct. 2006 | B-test boards become available; Libya announces plans for one laptop for every child |
| Sep. 2006 | UI designs presented; integrated software build released; SES-Astra joins OLPC |
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| Jun. 2006 | 500 developer boards are shipped worldwide; WiFi operational; Csound demonstrated over the mesh network First video with working prototype [1] |
| May 2006 | eBay joins OLPC; display specs set; A-test boards become available; $100 Server is announced |
| Apr. 2006 | Pre-A test board boots; Squid and FreePlay present first human-power systems |
| Mar. 2006 | Yves Behar and FuseProject are selected as industry designers |
| Feb. 2006 | Marvell joins OLPC and continues to partner on network hardware |
| Jan. 2006 | World Economic Forum, Switzerland UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement news release |
| Dec. 2005 | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop (html)(pdf) |
| Nov. 2005 | WSIS, Tunisia Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; Nortel joins OLPC Photos: (Image 1)
(Image 2) (Image 3) |
| Aug. 2005 | Design Continuum starts design of first laptop |
| Jul. 2005 | Formal signing of original members of OLPC |
| Mar. 2005 | Brightstar and Red Hat come on board |
| Jan. 2005 | Laptop initiative officially announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland; AMD, News Corp. and Google agree to join OLPC |
PRESS
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found.)
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx | Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University
http://www.technologyreview.com/ | Technology Review Mini-Documentary
