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Revision as of 16:25, 25 October 2008
Note: currently undergoing major re-edit. The page is in transtion right now and I hope to have a first pass edit ready for comment by Wed. future feature planning meeting. Gregorio 18:47, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
Overview
This page intends to layout a long term strategy for prioritizing software development on the XO. Feature lists for individual releases will appear on their respective pages as listed features get prioritized, scoped and a targeted. In addition to outlining goals and strategies, an extensive feature roadmap is maintained on this page, and is split in to two major parts:
- 1. Features, requirements and requests by country
- This section should be verbatim requests from technical leads or translated and reviewed rewrites of initial feedback. Only items specifically requested by a qualified technical lead, administrator, teacher or student in the country should go in this section.
- 2. Feature suggestions by technical strategy
- Each item in this section should include reference to the;Requester: (e.g. country or engineer or URLs to relevant discussions and sites). It should also include a reference to which element of the strategy it fits in to (if available).
Features are prioritized based solely on their value towards achieving the goals and executing the strategy. The amount of effort required and the availability of engineers to expend such effort is not included in the prioritization decision. The engineering and test work, the availability of relevant software and the available resources will be added as critical decision factors when determining what features are delivered in each release. This page is meant to be abstracted from releases and it should therefore include a superset of priorities for any given release.
Suggestions for providing input
- Please sign in to the wiki when updating this page so we know who made the edits.
- Feel free to add to this page following the guidelines described above.
- Comments on the submissions of others are best provided on the discussion page, or the discussion page for that particular section.
- Edits to original submissions should be discussed with the original poster beforehand.
- Follow the template when Requesting Features or Enhancements.
- Use the trac template when referencing tickets/bugs.
- Additional suggestions for providing input are welcome.
- Create a new section (At the == header 2 == level) for your country or request if none present are adequate.
Goals
Educational goals
Technical goals
Strategy
Educational strategy
Technical strategy
This section outlines the main areas of technology focus. All of the specific features should address one of these primary concerns. The choice of these comes from listening to users and deployment leads and hearing what their concerns. If a proposal for development does not fit in one of these areas, it should still be listed. Then it can stand on its own or the strategic priorities should be adjusted or added to.
Requests by deployments
See also: Deployments
Uruguay
Spanish
Greater than 100K x XOs deployed in schools.
New formulation of requirements from Uruguay. Build customization is top priority. Order of the remaining items does not reflect priority.
- Build customization, signing / upgrades
- Lease and theft management systems
- Journal to USB simplification
- Sugar performance improvements
- Collaboration (?)
- 802.1X (target roll out in 1 month)
- Web signed certificate
Rough notes below this line.
From Emiliano and Erik in e-mail:
Allow Uruguay to sign their own builds so that they can take an image from us, add their customizations then sign it and deploy on the XOs with the existing OLPC provided upgrade tools (e.g. olpc-update and USB keys).
An efficient system upgrade method (ideally this preserves user ata, ideally it can be done in schools with minimal manual effort).
- "Efficient" needs to be more carefully defined for this to be actionable. What resource is most precious? --Michael Stone 00:00, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
List of changes in the new build (to be used to decide the best time to upgrade their deployed systems).
- How are the present release notes inadequate? --Michael Stone 00:00, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
Request from Uruguay for HW alerts:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007086.html
In e-mail to Greg S:
Better performance of Sugar. Faster launch and close of activities, faster switching between activities, better network usage, more responsive Sugar including Journal.
Better Flash support. Minimum on par with FF 3 on XP.
From ErikG trip:
- Upgrade improvements including self signing
- Faster (better performance) including flash
- HW clock
- Journal to USB simplification (direct file system access) - teacher
Notes from the peanut gallery:
- an important question which I do not see being approached in these notes is "how are the Uruguay-based folks going to help get these patches written, tested, merged, and released?" --Michael Stone 00:07, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
Peru
Spanish
100K x XOs
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Peru
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peru_activity_pack
40K XOs with 656
100K XOs with build 703
Expected to update them each year at the beginning of the school year (Feb).
Request number 1: Activation lease security feature
Source: Kim trip from July 2008.
Requirement - if the laptop is stolen, and doesn't contact its local school server within some period time (activation lease time); then it will tell the user that it will not activate on next boot and provide date and time. When it gets in the vicinity of the school server again, it will be re-activated automatically.
Requirement - it is not possible to set the date on the laptop to keep it within the lease period or to force it to outside the lease management. This might mean you cannot change the date or there is no root access, or it might mean an alternate time source is used.
Request number 2: Improved performance
Source: Wad trip in April 2008
Speeding up the user interface especially time to launch activities (other?)
Request number 3: Easy creation of image with Peru specific activities and content
Source: Kim trip from July 2008.
This should allow them to add their own content and set of activities to a build after it is finalized and released by OLPC. The goal is for minimal or no OLPC involvement needed.
Request number 4: School Server monitoring of XOs
Source: Kim trip from July 2008.
I think there might be some work in the XO to make the information available; and a database and API spec from the school server. This is not as high priority for their deployment as the passive lease management, but I believe this feature will be important for any deployment. We should try to get feedback from other deployments as to the information we want to collect.
Requirement: Provide XS database and an API so that countries can create reports and monitoring for various aspects of XOs:
- Version of code
- Which laptops are being seen each day
- Total number of laptops being seen per day
- Number of laptops accessing the internet
- List of URLs being accessed
- List of URLs per laptop
- Which activities are being used per laptop
Request number 5: Collaboration in groups
Source: Kim trip from July 2008 and Wad trip from April 2008.
Requirements for groups (in priority order for Peru)
- Project Groups, which can be set up on the XO. These groups might stay together for days, weeks, or months - for example to discuss growing different vegetables or flowers. Generally smaller than a classroom. These groups can be created by students.
- Groups per classroom, to be set up on a School Server by someone with special access (needs a UI that can be use by a teacher with password, for instance). Use case is to be able to hand out books, vocabulary lists, etc. these would be best to do within a class.
- Groups at the grade level because each grade will have some common curriculum. This would be set up at the school server and require special access.
Request number 6: Backup and restore of XO user data
Make it easy to backup of the laptops. Should allow backup of user data before upgrade or clean install and then restore. Partially met by http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Blueprints:Datastore_Simple_Backup_and_Restore
Request number 7: Better power management and longer battery life.
Met by http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_Longer_battery_life but needs to be a fully functional and supported feature.
Request number 8: XS server running on XO
Source: Kim trip from July 2008.
Can require additional HW (e.g. SD card or USB drive) on XO. Not completely clear how important this one is to Peru.
Other Requirements from Peru
Source: Carla report.
- Allow upgrading with Kingston USB keys
- Tool integrated with the XO to collect teacher feedback on trainings
- Build training tools and enhance the training experience
Haiti
Kreyol
13K x XOs
Rough feedback from Bastien. Unedited. Need prioritization and lots more details. Gregorio 20:40, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
- Power (battery)
- touchpads
- server updates, backups, used to recover from or prevent lost work
- record bugs?
- collaboration
- RF
- Application o sugarize activities
See also: http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/olpc_feedback.php
Comment from Wanda:
Clear ideas of how to create applications.
- Not just an explanation, but quick and easy ways to do it!
- Convert Java applets
- Activities with summer programs, kids exhausted scope of activities.
Wanted more. Application releases that will grow with the kids, have an application release periodically.
Rwanda
10K x XOs with English keyboards.
Raw feedback from Juliano and Brian. Needs clarification, updating and additional details:
- power (better saving, how to charge 70 x XOs in one electric socket) Strips didn't work. porto alegre could use strips? but not Rwanda....
- network
- More activities with authoring and exploration. Scratch was main tool but not completely sugarized. (ask - which one?). Pippy was good for core team. More than Scratch for long term exploration.
Ethiopia
Amharic
5k x XOs
They need some fixes to Amharic implementation which require a piece of software called SCIM. See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Localization for more details.
No Internet access currently available and no school servers planned.
May consider school servers if they can get critical features from them (e.g. lease activation).
Top request so far is lease activation that times out if XO doesn't call home.
Verbatim from Eskender:
- Security / leasing using the school server
- Content update using the school server
- Amharic input method ( consonant + vowel) instead of vowel consonant. Ticket No.8494
- we would like to have features where we can install .rpm files which we need for some activities
Dan's input on top priorities from Ethiopia:
Lease activation P1
Lower Power Consumption P1
RPM install to allow Akili P2
Power button not understood P2
PDF reader issues P2
School server scale P3
Arabic
Lebanon?
500 x XOs
Birmingham
English
Afghanistan
Dari
3000 x XOs
G1G1
English, other?
Mexico
Spanish
50K x XOs
Mongolia
Mongolian?
Journal entries saved it Cyrillic can be opened.
Ability to easily upgrade. So Students do not have to go to terminal and type olpc-update --usb. Build this into an "Upgrade Stick" similar to Customization Key.
20K x XOs
Comments from Elana: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/019994.html
Abbreviated here:
1) Computers are slow
2) Can't save files - this should probably be the first item on my
list.
3) Basically - The journal is really hard for people/ kids to use over a longer period of time. Kids and teachers can't find things that they did unless it was done within the last 30 minutes.
4) Mesh problems - my sense is that you are all pretty aware of those issues.
Cambodia
Khmer
1000 XOs
Thailand
Thai
500 x XOs
India
Devanagari
500
Brazil
Portuguese
200 x XOs
Oceania
Enlish?
500 x XOs
Italy
Italian
600 x XOs
Turkey
Turkish?
15k x XOs
Senegal
French
1000 x XOs
Argentina
Equitorial Guinea
Panama
Spanish
South Carolina
English
New York City
English
China
?
Pakistan
URDU & English
Requirements and Feature Requests
Requesting Features or Enhancements
This section lists major features to be added to Sugar over time. Each request should use the feature request template (you can copy/paste from below), providing as much information as possible.
Please sign in to the wiki before adding or editing feature requests.
{{Feature_request
|Name=
|Requesters=
|Requirements=
|Specification=
|Owners=
}}
The elements of such a request are described below. The text for these elements may be listed on the same line as the parameter, just after the equals (=) sign, or on the following line(s). Where appropriate, please use numbered or bulleted lists to identify individual requirements or specification ideas.
- Name
- A brief, one-line summary of the feature, used as the title on the page
- Requesters
- Deployments, engineers, or both who support the request
- Requirements
- User level requirement definition; Links to detailed wiki pages, mailing list threads, or other resources are welcome
- Specification
- Design and technical implementation ideas; Links to detailed wiki pages, mailing list threads, or other resources are welcome
- Owners
- Names of developers and/or champions of the request who will ensure that progress is made
See also: general suggestions for providing input.
New activities
| Requesters | Birmingham, Juliano | |
| Requirements | From Birmingham:
From Juliano:
| |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Sugarized color picker
| Requesters | Juliano | |
| Requirements | A better color picker in Paint & Write. Current one "...is made for professionals to get the HTML code of the color, but it also leads to error since people need to select the color in the circle and then in the triangle. It is giving bad time to people around here [Rwanda]". From Juliano in e-mail 9/1 | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Easy "Sugarization"
| Requesters | Wanda, David | |
| Requirements | Make it easy to sugarize third party applications. It should be trivial to take an existing application which runs on Fedora (or other Linux too?) and install and run it on the XO. The basic sugarization interface for that should be usable by a non-programmer. Not all sugar features need to be enabled (will define exact list if this gets to requirements definition stage). Additional sugar capability may require programming (e.g. collaboration). The goal is to allow deployments to use any state of the art application available in Linux/Fedora. Secondarily, make it easy to do the same for web based applications (Google Gears, Picasa, etc.). tbd if this needs to include client side Java support. | |
| Specification | See related X-windows threads on devel (links and references appreciated). This may also impact datastore and other areas. | |
| Owners | Greg |
Power management
Improved battery life
| Requesters | Kim, Carla, Gnu, Ethiopia, Juliano | |
| Requirements | A list of UI actions which may affect power usage: Requirements#Power Management Requirements Our job is to increase battery life in as many modes as possible. | |
| Specification | Background on power draw including a break down watts used in different modes:
Significant technical actions (as suggested by John/Gnu) that could reduce the laptop's power draw:
| |
| Owners | Gnu, Chris |
Hardware support
Accurate touchpad
| Requesters | Carla | |
| Requirements | User talk:Gregorio#Priorities from Carla | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners | Wad |
Collaboration
Synchronous Collaboration
| Requesters | Carla and David, Teachers on OLPC-Sur, Peru technical leaders | |
| Requirements | See detailed collaboration requirements here: 9.1.0 Collaboration Requirements
| |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Inter-school communication
| Requesters | ||
| Requirements | What I see as most missing and most necessary is a safe space for collaboration between students at different schools, even in different
countries. http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/localization/2008-July/001249.html | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Scalable presence service
| Requesters | ||
| Requirements | * Complete Gadget implementation, which should hopefully fix our current scalabity issues and offer new features as activity and buddies search. (cassidy)
| |
| Specification | See Gadget integration TODO for more details. | |
| Owners | Guillaume Desmottes, Dafydd Harries, Eben Eliason, Morgan Collett |
Scalable Link-local presence
| Requesters | ||
| Requirements | Undefined | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners | Morgan Collett, Sjoerd Simons, Elliott Fairweather, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos |
Collaboration Groups
| Requesters | Peru | |
| Requirements | Group support in gabble and salut (Trac #4043) | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners | Eben |
Performance
Faster activity launch and save
| Requesters | Peru, Uruguay | |
| Requirements | ||
| Specification | http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6472 | |
| Owners |
Faster task switching
| Requesters | Peru, Uruguay | |
| Requirements | ||
| Specification | ||
| Owners | Erik |
General UI sluggishness
| Requesters | Uruguay, Peru | |
| Requirements | ||
| Specification | From: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007471.html | |
| Owners | Marco, Erik |
Reliability
Memory Pressure
| Requesters | Elana, Peru, Carla | |
| Requirements | http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/0.84/Reliability#Memory_bloat | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Journal
| Requesters | Everyone | |
| Requirements | http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/0.84/Reliability#Datastore_rework | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Clipboard
| Requesters | Eben | |
| Requirements | http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/0.84/Reliability#Solid_clipboard | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners | Eben, Tomeu, Marco |
Journal, File Manipulation
"Candy Bag" or "Bulletin Board" activity
| Requesters | ||
| Requirements | Idea for a new activity: Candy Bag. You open a bag (i.e. you launch the CandyBag activity), then you put journal entries in it, then sharing
this activity means that your friends can grab a candy in your bag. From: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-July/017459.html | |
| Specification | I'd be curious to see if there is a benefit to having a task like this manifested as an activity. It might work well. In fact, this might be the "Bulletin board" activity we've been wanting all along. There's also a design for a more embedded XO to XO object transfer system. Eben 19:40, 19 September 2008 (UTC) | |
| Owners |
Object transfer
| Requesters | several deployments; not sure which | |
| Requirements | A way to send objects from one XO to another without a USB key, and without sharing the activity. | |
| Specification | XO to XO object transfer system. Eben 19:40, 19 September 2008 (UTC) | |
| Owners | Simon, Eben |
Copying files between Journal and USB
| Requesters | Bastien, Uruguay | |
| Requirements | As close to one click to cpoy files from Journal to USB. | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
File name and directory access
| Requesters | Gnu, Ben, Erik, Greg, Marvin | |
| Requirements | Allow listing, copying and finding files with standard Unix commands in the terminal view. See also point #1 at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#e-mail_from_Ben_S | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Localization
Translation Technology (See an earlier post, Scaling and localization in package management, for background.)
Spell checking
| Requesters | Sayamindu, Sur list | |
| Requirements | ||
| Specification | ||
| Owners | Sayamindu |
Language customization
| Requesters | Sayamindu, Sur list | |
| Requirements | An ability customize language (and related settings) without OLPC intervention | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Chinese language support
| Requesters | Kim | |
| Requirements | ||
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
RTL support
| Requesters | ||
| Requirements | ||
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
SCIM
| Requesters | Sayamindu | |
| Requirements | We need to migrate to SCIM for our input method needs. Our current input method (XKB with XIM) does not work with languages like Chinese, and there are enhancement requests from existing deployments (eg: <trac>8494</trac>) which can only be handled via SCIM. | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners | Sayamindu |
Security, activation and deployability
GUI OS Updates
| Requesters | Eben, Scott | |
| Requirements | Easy GUI update of OS over net or from USB; Mostly for G1G1 but useful for all. | |
| Specification | (I believe this needs to be divided into 'customization key' and initial install. The install has to do with the logistics, USB keys and wireless downloads. Customization has to do with how the image is created before the logistics of how to get it on laptops. Kimquirk 17:25, 9 October 2008 (UTC))
Many deployments have noted how hard it is to install or upgrade, especially on thousands of XOs. One issue is that inevitably, the Xos ship from the factory with an older build and countries need to upgrade them before deploying. I call that "upgrade in a warehouse". In other cases the XOs get deployed but there is little or no WAN available to upgrade. | |
| Owners |
Faster imaging
| Requesters | Ethiopia, Rwanda, Haiti | |
| Requirements | This feature request is needed to minimize the time to install a custom image over a wireless or wired network. It will be used when an XO comes from the factory with an older release. The deployment then needs to upgrade to the latest release and possibly install some customizations (e.g. content, language pack, activities, see also separate customization requirement below). The solution must be faster than imaging via USB sticks for imaging more than 1,000 XOs. Must allow install of new image via wireless or wired network. Possibly sub-variants of in school case for Mesh, Wireless AP, XS.
Workflow example for the network case above:
| |
| Specification | See also: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Multicast_NAND_FLASH_Update Some open issues to be addressed by the design proposal:
limit it to set # of XOs at a time? Can we scale it by using more "channels" or more APs?
| |
| Owners | Greg, Reuben, Mitch |
Image customization
| Requesters | Uruguay, Ethiopia, Colombia, Mexico (the last two especially for startup image customization). See source thread from Colombia at: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-July/017299.html | |
| Requirements | When imaging a new laptop or upgrading a laptop we must allow the deployment to create a custom image. This special image will allow XOs to be re-imaged via USB or over a network (via olpc-update to internet, via olpc-update to XS, via Quicker Imaging feature above). The customized image must allow configuration of the following items. These should be settable when creating a new image or when upgrading unless otherwise noted.
See also:
The following two points need redefinition and clarification:
| |
| Specification | * http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/011553.html | |
| Owners |
School server push of XO images
| Requesters | Peru | |
| Requirements | * The XO should be able to get the latest build from the school server
| |
| Specification | ||
| Owners | Martin |
Activation lease security
| Requesters | Peru, Ethiopia (points 4 and 5), Uruguay? | |
| Requirements | * II-A1: Requirement - if the laptop is stolen, and doesn't contact its local school server within some period time (activation lease time); then it will tell the user that it will not activate on next boot and provide date and time.
Actual security requirements: User:Mstone/Commentaries/Security_1 | |
| Specification | * http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4043 | |
| Owners |
Theft reporting
| Requesters | Peru? | |
| Requirements | Sometimes known as 'active kill'. If the laptop is stolen, the serial number can be added to a 'stolen laptop' list so the laptop's activation can be turned off the next time it finds either a local school server or a global tracking server.
| |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
XO Monitoring
| Requesters | Peru | |
| Requirements | Provide XS database and an API so that countries can create reports and monitoring for various aspects of XOs such as:
This is not as high priority for their deployment as the passive lease management, but I believe this feature will be important for any deployment. We should try to get feedback from other deployments as to the information we want to collect. | |
| Specification | I (Kim) think there might be some work in the XO to make the information available; and a database and API spec from the school server. | |
| Owners | Kim |
Network
802.1x Support
| Requesters | Uruguay | |
| Requirements | Must allow association with APs running 802.1x | |
| Specification | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Standard_and_amendments | |
| Owners |
Reliable access to encrypted APs
| Requesters | G1G1 | |
| Requirements | Must reliably (better definition needed) associate with APs running WEP, WPA and WPAv2 | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Network Manager GUI
| Requesters | ||
| Requirements | Needs definition of exactly what should be changed, why and how. | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Document and Improve default network connection
| Requesters | ? | |
| Requirements | Better default network connection choice algorithm (e.g. if USB - Ethernet is connected, use it first source: A Callahan).
This algorithm should be "smart" in its first choice but should also be adjustable in the GUI.
Needs further definition. | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
GUI, Usability
Hardware alerts
| Requesters | Uruguay | |
| Requirements | http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007086.html | |
| Specification | Designs ideas from Scott and Eben in thread. e.g. I hope our alert system will use the freedesktop.org standard: http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/index.php There is a visual design for the notification system as well. | |
| Owners |
Contextual help
| Requesters | Brianne | |
| Requirements | One idea from Eben. From: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-August/007547.html All of our initial discussions on help focused around a contextual help system, and I still hope that this is where we'll be taking this in the future. By embedding (?) icons within the secondary palette menus for various devices, objects, activities, and even individual buttons and controls, we can provide a way to launch into the help activity and dive directly to the relevant info for the activity, control, etc. selected. In addition, I'd like to support a community driven help system by which, in addition to the activity/olpc provided help, it's possible for kids to add tips, tricks, images, tutorials, and other info to these sections for later consumption by peers. This is a noble, but ambitious goal, which is why a simple and static help activity is the present solution, and why it's only integrated into the system at a single point - the activity itself. | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Trash can
| Requesters | Bastien | |
| Requirements | http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-August/007889.html | |
| Specification | ||
| Owners |
Scalable zoom levels
| Requesters | UI Team, Collabora | |
| Requirements | We need to support a mechanism for auto-filtering the view to a "reasonable" set of activities and XOs, and provide rich mechanisms (search and filters) for adjusting one's perspective on the view to find items of interest. | |
| Specification | Gadget is the core of this effort. We need some additional UI work to hook it up. One aspect of the solution is the addition of list views to all zoom levels, making it possible to list the entire set of people, activities, access points etc, see their icon and name at a glance, sort alphabetically or by type, and also filter as desired. | |
| Owners | Eben, Collabora |
Other
System Clock
| Requesters | Birmingham and seen on devel list (anyone have time to search for the threads?) | |
| Requirements |
| |
| Specification | ||
| Owners | Greg |
Screen Zoom
| Requesters | Greg | |
| Requirements | This idea came from watching kids and grownups gathering around an XO and trying to see what someone else is doing.
| |
| Specification | Ben said that the Geode has HW scaling with interpolation. This feature should come at no/bare minimum cost to CPU cycles and performance. | |
| Owners | Greg |
Priorities from Engineering
The following is maintained here for the history and a look at what people want to do by engineer. However, I hope that everything in this section will also have a place in the Feature list above. If you added something here, please also find a home for it in the section above.
Thanks Gregorio 13:13, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
- #4662 needed for better activity capabilities.
- #2447 caps lock
- #1997 flashing in write
- NAND full crashes system
- I think analyzing performance of non-JFFS2 file systems and picking a replacement should be a high-priority item for 9.1 update.
- from: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-July/016994.html
- #2188 sharing files and resources between activities
- #1496 Switch to real public keys - Scott
- #8170
- #8171
- #8177
Upgrade journal per: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Laptop_Experience/The_Journal
Less flickering in starting activities and other screen changes - Michael
Show memory usage to user:
We provide no end user feedback on memory usage, either. We should investigate whether revisiting our previous attempt to give such feedback, now that Linux can provide much better information than it could when we abandoned our previous donut attempt. The users could really help, if only we let them know a bit about what was going on...
From Jim e-mail to devel: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-September/018944.html
Fedora 10 rebase?
Fix all GPL issues and get sign off from FSF that we are fully compliant.
Ensure the blinking of the lights is meaningful.
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-September/008237.html
Debug tool that easily allows plug of diagnostic USB stick which analyzes and reports back detailed status.
ErikG idea from Uruguay
Backup to Internet idea from Walter:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-September/008340.html
Stability suggestion from Albert C (and his children) re. protecting against out of RAM conditions:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-September/019575.html
Sugar roadmap
http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap/0.84
Easier Access to and Help Using Source Code
Put a link in the library on the XO which links to GIT or other relevant source. (source: John/Gnu)
Improved clipboard
Here is a rough specification of the intended design for a usable multi-item clipboard. I'll add a list of related tickets shortly.
Sugar architecture ideas
From thread started by Michael S
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007304.html
e-mail from Ben S
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007390.html
1. The datastore
Sugar's design calls for a centralized rich data storage system, the
datastore. The datastore provides secure, limited file access to
Activities, manages file metadata, maintains a differentially compressed
history of all work, ensures reliable backups to a trusted server, and
mediates the connection to removable media. Every one of these features
is crucial to Sugar's functioning, and almost none are really working at
this time. We cannot afford another release based on the present
datastore, as it fails to implement the features we require, and is
unreliable even in the features it supposedly implements.
Solution:
There have, at this point, been at least five distinct proposals for a
next-generation datastore design, all differing in underlying
implementation and user-facing functionality. We need to have a Once And
For All datastore summit, draw up a compromise datastore design, and
implement it. We can do this by 9.1.0, if we are willing to make it a
priority.
Additional Links:
- The current datastore
- Olpcfs
- Sugar Datastore Summit in January (item 10).
- SDS (stands for Simple Data Store or possibly something else)
- Git-based datastore design
- Expose the file system on save, open and in the journal. Source: Marvin Minsky
2. OS Updates
We now have hundreds of thousands of laptops deployed in the field,
running a variety of OS versions. OLPC cannot afford to support a
multitude of decrepit versions, and children cannot afford to suffer
defects that have long since been fixed. We need a reliable, fast,
update system that does not rely on the network, so that children
everywhere can move to the
latest version of Sugar without losing their data. The update system must
support tremendously invasive upgrades, like repartitioning the NAND and
replacing JFFS2, because we expect to do this in short order.
Solution:
A secure usb autoreinstallation stick is required. It is not technically
challenging to implement, but it must be made a priority, and then be made
widely available and idiot-proof.
3. File Sharing
Students and teachers have no good way to distribute files directly from
one person's Journal to another. If all Activities that open a file do
not implement Collaboration, then there is simply no way to transfer that
file over the network. This is the most basic possible network
functionality --- FTP was standardized in 1971 --- but it is completely
missing from our system.
Solution:
A number of technical proof-of-concept programs have been written for
distributing files, using methods like HTTP over stream tubes and
Cerebro's Teleport. There is an excellent set of [[Specifications/Object_Transfers|UI mockups for this]
functionality. All that is left is to Get It Done.
Additional Links:
4. Activity Modification
A keystone of the Sugar design has always been the user's ability to edit
any Activity, and to cement this a "View Source" key was designed right
into the hardware. This functionality is simply missing, and that
prevents us from making our principal claim regarding an emphasis on user
modification.
Solution:
"Develop" must be polished, finished, and included by default. This will
require modifications to the core system, in order to support an endless
variety of slightly modified Activities. It will also require work on the
Develop program itself. If volunteer efforts are not moving fast enough, OLPC
must ensure that someone is working on the problem as a professional.
Additional links:
- Develop
- Previous, stalled attempt at Develop
- Current status of "view source"
- OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Laptop_Experience/View_Source
- EAG_The_Laptop_Experience:_View_Source
5. Bitfrost
Sugar, as it currently stands, is among the least secure operating systems
ever, far less secure than any modern Linux or Windows OS. I can easily
write an Activity that, when run by the user, escalates to root privileges
and does anything I like with the system. Given Sugar's competitive
status against Windows XO, this failing threatens the very existence of
the project. The Sugar designs have long stated that safely running
untrusted code from a classmate is a key goal for learning, but the
current software accomplishes precisely the opposite.
Solution:
NO ONE IS WORKING ON BITFROST. That's right. Everyone who was working on
Sugar security (after activation) has either left OLPC or moved into
another role. Someone must be assigned to continue the security work, or
it will certainly never make progress. Anyone who _does_ take on this
challenge will start from a much better position than previously,
because many of the Vserver features have moved into the mainline kernel
over the last few versions. The kernel now contains a number of new,
powerful isolation and control primitives.
6. Power management
Power management is the raison d'etre of the XO hardware. It is the
reason that the hardware took four times as long to develop as a standard
laptop, the reason that we suffer from the closed Marvell operating
system, the reason that OLPC's best engineers flew around the globe
fighting with details of voltage and capacitance. In an increasingly
crowded low cost laptop market, it is one of OLPC's few remaining
distinctions. As of 8.2.0, aggressive suspend is available, but its
functionality is still far from the target.
Solution:
Enabling aggressive power management is a major challenge, perhaps more
difficult than anything else on this list. We know what is required for a
first step: ensure that we can reliably wake up from a hardware timer.
This single feature would be enough to enable a basic sleepy approach that is truly transparent to software. Other work includes removing USB from the critical path on resume. Aggressive suspend may not be ready for 9.1.0, but if no one is working on it it will never be ready.
Easy update for G1G1
I think this is the biggest missing feature for G1G1 users, honestly. The software update control panel for activities is a great step in the right direction, but to really get people into Sugar moving forward, we have to make one-click updates a reality. They have no school server or other centralized source doing it for them, and we can't expect many to go through the manual update process. Once we have a super-simple control-panel-integrated dev key request process, we should also adjust the update UI to offer cutting-edge updates to those with keys.
From Eben and Joe
Suggestions from User:CScott
Moved to User:CScott#Desiderata_for_9.1.0. Crib proposals from there. The canonical source for my 9.1.0 proposals is now the postings to devel@ I made, with subject lines beginning, "9.1 Proposal:".
TODO list of User:Sayamindu
- Language Packs version 3
- Packs should be as RPMs
- Utilize patches from Ubuntu for Python and Glibc to define a separate install location/search path for PO files installed via the packs
- Also see CScott's wishlist above.
- SCIM support
- Conversion of all existing layouts to m17n db format , along with refinements and better support for modifiers whenever possible (<trac>6280</trac>
- Modification of relevant startup and configuration scripts for SCIM support
- User experience for keyboard layout switching should not change
- Proper handling of Amharic characters (<trac>8494</trac>)
- Implementation of OLPC_Nepal_Keyboard
- Enhanced i18n
- Better support for translation of content
- Investigation of the possibility of using native digits for translations <trac>7857</trac>
- Read improvements
- Better Ebook mode support (still vague on this.. expect more details soon)
- Terminal improvements
- Copy paste and drag and drop support enhancements
- Pippyfication (<trac>5543</trac>)
- Better handling of "Run as root in the UI"
- Support for standard desktop applications in Sugar
- Replace matchbox with something more friendlier to standard desktop applications
- Support for .desktop files in the launcher list
- Support startup-notification
- Support standard application icons on the frame
Thoughts from User:cjb
- Power turned on by default.
- Translation of Sugar inside Sugar?
- A working Distribute activity for journal objects (could be in the Journal)
Thoughts from User:Mstone
- Security already contains my immediate security roadmap.
- My user page links to several of my other ideas, many of which are procedural improvements with software components.
- My largest ongoing concern is that we have not yet smoothly carried a deployment through an update to a new major stable release. (Peru may become our first exception to this rule, but this remains to be seen.)
Notes from sj
This page shouldn't be broken down by contributor; it needs serious refactoring and organization by topic and scope.
Library and bundle updates:
- API and .info unification across content and activity bundles. Making both and a general generic bundle clearly described within an overarching bundle format.
- thought experiment : how does one present an activity (has its own isolation-friendly code) that includes a library bundle (its own browser-browsable static content, help and supplemental materials) and a generic resource bundle (a repository of sounds and images) look like? How do other parts of the system (the Journal, Browse, other activities) see and interact with these three collections of material (to browse and copy the code, to view the static content, to aggregate the resource collections with other collections)?
- a Dynamic library implementation
- coordination of a unified help interface building on top of the library bundles defined for each activity on the system.
- integration of some way to update and share this. related to how to leave a comment on/about an activity or file/resource
- coordination of local library bundles, and regional caches of viewed material, school server caches of bundles, and web caches.
- cleaner display of available bundles via a bundle updater; relatd to but not the same as the current software upgrade function, which has a strong emphasis on olpc-stamped/signed materials
Sharing updates:
- provide a way to send a file to someone else. related to bundle (activity).
- provide a way to publish material to the world. related slightly to how edublog works now? see also robson's and juliano's interests here
- add support for asynchronous sharing over time : the sharing of an effort should not require everyone to be online at once.
Adding basic interface pieces that we want to support in the long term, and making them do something familiar, reliably, every time they are at hand. "escape", "stop/start", "share", "view source", "keep", "cut" and "paste" should all do fairly reliable things across activities. Make them do something recognizable even when the activity developer hasn't provided an app-specific hook for same.
Replacement file system
The current file system used on the XO ([JFFS2]) was developed in the days of 32/64MiB NOR flash devices and does not scale well to the 1GiB NAND devices we are using today and certainly will not deal well with larger devices in gen 1.5 and gen 2 systems. The main issues are that JFFS2 needs to scan all blocks at mount time and that the garbage collection algorithm increasingly consumes CPU cycles as the system fills up. The first issue manifests itself as large delays at boot up to mount the file system as it is full (need to quantify this), and the second issue simply means less CPU cycles can be dedicated to user task processing. In the last few years, there has been much activity in the embedded Linux world on alternatives to JFFS2 and we need to investigate these to determine which one best fits our needs:
- YAFFS2 : Has been around for several years and in active use in the embedded space. It does not provide compression out of the box as the devices that use it often carry already compressed data such as MP3 and MPG files.
- UBIFS: A new file system recently merged into the kernel designed for use on large flash devices. Supports compression out of the box and supports disabling compression on a per-inode basis, which is something we desire.
- LogFS : Another JFFS2 replacement designed for fast operation and scalability. Still fairly new and not in very active use AFAIK.
- Btrfs : A very new file system that is primarily targeted for large storage systems with features such as snapshotting, RAID support, and online fsck. David Woodhouse has expressed that he will look into getting this to work on NAND, but it is too new of a code base to consider for 9.1
- Managed NAND : (Not an option for existing XO machines, but might be a direction for future hardware) The industry seems to be moving away from raw NAND in favor of a NAND-chip plus microcontroller solution. The microcontroller implements a Flash Translation Layer that hides the low level NAND details, presenting a higher level interface that looks like an ordinary hard disk, so an ordinary filesystem layout like ext3 could be used. The driving force behind managed NAND is rapid hardware evolution toward multi-level-cell NAND chips and smaller process geometries, which change important NAND parameters like page sizes and ECC. The situation is similar to what happened with hard disks in the 80's, where raw-disk interfaces gave way to SCSI and IDE, which hide the ugly low-level details that changed every technology generation. Managed NAND options include LBA-NAND from Toshiba (pin-compatible with NAND chips), eMMC from multiple vendors (with an SD/MMC-compatible hardware interface), and various "disk on chip" products (IDE-compatible interface).
Development process
- Analyze and quantify the use patterns that trigger issues with JFFS2.
- Gather requirements for a new file system that go beyond solving above issues.
- Develop/integrate a set of tests for FS performance and reliability that take into account our use patterns, the above issues, and any other features we wish to validate.
- Study the three main alternatives (YAFFS, UbiFS, LogFS) to determine what requirements they meet
- Run our FS test suite on above alternatives
- Analyze test results and requirements study and make a decision on which alternative to use.
Deployment process
Once a file system is chosen from the above process, we will have to:
- Integrate the file system into our kernel if it is not upstream (YAFFS2 or Logfs)
- Integrate the file system support packages into our build system and file system images
- Update our build scripts to generate the proper image type for
Activity impact
This change should not have any impact on activity developers as it is at a very low level of the stack.
End-user impact
End users will see faster boot up time and will not see (as much) performance degradation as the file system fills up.
Comments from other interested parties
Browse/XULRunner opportunities from User:Skierpage
XULRunner 1.9.1, the Mozilla code powering Firefox 3.1, should be released in the 9.1.0 timeframe.
Activities and content can use its new features, at the risk of incompatibility with earlier Sugar releases.
<audio> and <video> in the browser
XULRunner 1.9.1 supports the HTML5 <audio> and <video> tags, providing the ability to play OGG audio and video files natively in the browser. This will probably improve performance and reduce memory footprint compared with embedding the Totem plugin, the trade-off needs to be tested and Browse configured accordingly.
Wikipedia articles and thus Wikislices can take advantage of this, and richer multimedia in Browse becomes practical.
Key modules and relevant module roadmaps
Standard information
(These are all semantic annotations that other pages such as Releases can query.)
Release notes: Release notes/Feature roadmap
Status: status::gathering requirements and setting priorities
Primary maintainer: not chosen yet
ECO: not yet
Primary objectives:
- [[Has objective::This is a time-based release per the process at: Release Process Home.]]
- Has objective::Not chosen yet.
The process is not final. It is a set of rough guidelines still being worked out and subject to change.
Lead customer: ?
Build number and URL: Build number::999
Schedule: tbd, should be first half CY 09 and possibly as early as December 2008.
Template proposal
A proposed template for managing this page:Template:Feature_request. In addition to looking nice, use of a template makes it easy to update or adjust the appearance of all feature requests easily in the future.
My cool feature
| Requesters | Some countries | |
| Requirements | Some requirements
| |
| Specification | Detailed specification
| |
| Owners | Some developers |