OLPC:News: Difference between revisions

From OLPC
Jump to navigation Jump to search
No edit summary
Line 4: Line 4:


=LAPTOP NEWS=
=LAPTOP NEWS=
“Our strategic goal is all children should access to communications
1. Mechanical system: Mark Foster and the hardware team have been working hard responding to field feedback on the B1 machines. It is always very satisfying to ship out the first build machines, but now comes the serious work of transforming the OLPC machine into a production-worthy system. This enhancement process will impact all areas of the system. The mechanical engineering team, for instance, is now focused primarily on increasing robustness and longevity, fit and finish, and on improving production efficiency. Special thanks to Bret Recor for his incredible efforts this week assisting the mechanical team—his contributions were both impressive and sincerely appreciated!
knowledge within a frame of equality.” -- President Tabaré Vázquez


1. President Tabaré Vázquez officially announced his and the country's
2. Electrical system: The electrical team is particularly focused on signal integrity. Thanks are due here to AMD, for their advice and suggestions, which will definitely improve the robustness of the system. In addition, some power-system issues have been reported in the field, so the system's front-end has been significantly improved to handle the wide variety of operating environments that we are encountering. Fortunately, some of these issues are controllable by the built-in firmware in the system's embedded controller and so may easily be updated in the field. Special thanks to Mitch Bradley for creating a super easy-to-use update tool that will make it easy to rapidly update our systems in the field with the new code!
intention to enter into OLPC and to provide every child in Uruguay with a
laptop within two years. He was joined by the minister of industry and
3. Software: Work continues on the wireless driver. Marcelo Tosatti has apparently tracked down the scan hang we were seeing. We'll see a fix for that in our builds at some point. We are getting pretty close to an upstream merged
mines, the vice-president, the minister of education, and the president of
of that code.
LATU (the national coordinator for OLPC). He invited a group of
schoolchildren to unveil a B1 machine for the gathering. He stated this
would be by far the greatest accomplishment of his administration. He ended
with a story of how when he was a child, growing up poor and attending
public school, when they would see a big car driving down the street, they
knew that they had the opportunity to achieve and even to become a doctor
and then president, as he did. However, he says now these poor children
know they do NOT have that opportunity. It has become no longer possible.
OLPC changes that and restores this opportunity, enabling any child to
learn and to become what she or he desires. The link to the text of the
address (in Spanish) is:
http://www.presidencia.gub.uy/_Web/noticias/2006/12/2006121402.htm


2. Brasilia: The Brazilian government convened a new educational strategic
4. Dan Williams, Marco Gritti, and Robert McQueen have been discussing changes to the underlying protocol we have been using on the local mesh network to communicate between the laptops. This is required to set us up to be able to scale up to server-mitigated networks using Jabber, the underlying protocol used in many chat networks, including Google Talk.
advisory group composed of the many experienced people who have done
innovative work on computers and learning, some of whom for more than 25
years. Some of them worked with Paulo Freire and Jean Piaget, and one, Jose
Valente, was a student of Seymour Papert and Marvin Minsky at the MIT AI
Lab. The group was unanimous and effusive in its support for the OLPC
concept and is committed to helping the government on all aspects towards a
successful deployment.


3. Håkon Wurm Lie reports that the Opera browser is now running nicely on a
5. Robert also did some testing using the gstreamer framework and reports that video conferencing looks entirely doable on the laptop. He says that video streaming works smoothly with FFmpeg's H263 codec at QCIF resolution (about 176×120) at 15 frames per second, taking up about 40–50% of the CPU to encode and about 10–15% to decode. Increasing the resolution takes the CPU usage up considerable, but it might be possible to do QVGA (320×240). More testing and performance work is desirable. Audio streaming works fine with PCMU (one audio encoding) but he wasn't able to test Speex (another audio coding) because it appeared to be broken. We'll have to do some more testing.
B1 machine (Instructions can be found on our wiki at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Web_Browser).


4. This week Marco Gritti and Dan Williams started work on the Journal
6. User interface: Dan, Marco, Ivan Krstić, and Eben Eliason held a day-long charrette at Pentagram. The primary focus was on the journal design and a set of first features to implement has been selected. Also moving along has been activity-bundle implementation and the beginnings of how the clipboard will work.
implementation, based on the design work that was done during the previous
week. This includes the beginning of the UI and the underlying storage
framework.


5. Wireless: Work continues on the wireless driver. Marcelo Tosatti has
7. Performance: As Nicholas has repeatedly pointed out, for the last 15 years, software has become larger and often much slower. Ian Piumarta (and others working with Alan Kay) has been working on an extensible, dynamic, object-oriented language system that holds the promise of radical performance improvement on languages such as Python and Javascript, now heavily used by OLPC. This work seeks to both radically simplify building such languages and achieve much higher performance. Building an implementation of Javascript or Smalltalk in this system can be as little as a few thousand lines of code; a simple Javascript implementation can be done in just over 400 lines of code, yet be faster than the carefully crafted conventional interpreter orders of magnitude larger. It is entirely possible the technology Ian has developed will not only be used for languages of key interest to OLPC, but even long before then, it may result in greatly increasing the performance of graphics on the OLPC and the Linux desktop in general.
been fixing more association and scan hangs and is pretty close to getting
the driver upstream. He's also cleaned out a large amount of unused code.
Once that driver is in a workable state, Marcelo will be spending time
working on the out of memory problems that will eventually rear its head
and how we handle that at an application level.


6. John got a lot of work done on the images as well. We've moved to the
8. Chris Ball started serious exploration of Python performance on OLPC, and established a baseline of the Cairo graphics library performance on our hardware, and confirmed the great performance improvements seen elsewhere in Cairo. By linking Python differently, it appears a 40% improvement of performance is easy to achieve. Chris also worked with Mitch on completion of an extremely simple system update procedure. We can now update the software entirely on an OLPC system in about 3 minutes elapsed time and 20 seconds of human time.
current set of Fedora Core 6 updates and we've got a new kernel in our
builds. We've also got builds of the new Cairo and Pango packages and
we're going to see if they make a difference in the rendering performance
on the machine.


7. Boot time: Chris Blizzard spent some time learning about the device
9. Mitch and Richard Smith will shortly release a new version of the BIOS, containing fixes for some of the battery-charging problems that have been reported.
manager that we use on the machine. There is a lot of room for
optimization: during startup this segment takes about 15–20 seconds to
start up; it is possible we can get that down to 2–5 seconds. In addition,
Chris has also done some investigation in how much time it takes to start
up the other services that are required on the machine. In conjunction
with the work that David Zeuthen continues to do, a 30-second startup time
is not unreasonable.

8. The news from the AMD team is excellent process on the X driver; e.g.,
it now supports dynamic rotation of the screen. In the process, Jordan
Crouse extensively cleaned up the driver; he fixed memory allocation,
improved setting the mode, fixed debug messages, etc.

9. Performance is now becoming high priority. Chris Ball has updated the
tinderbox to work with our B-test setup, and added tinderbox tests to log
boot time (tracking times for each of LinuxBIOS –> OFW –> kernel –> init –>
X), and to run Python and Cairo benchmarks, to give us a baseline ahead of
adding Cairo and Python performance improvements.

10. Andres Salomon merged 2.6.19.1 into the olpc-2.6 tree. We don't have it
in an image yet, but it appears to run just fine. He also finally fixed Bug
#520 (No keyboard or mouse input under Qemu or VMWare) and the
i8042-looping-infinitely bug (with a proper fix, not a workaround),
released a new kernel, and had j5 incorporate it into Build 196. He has
discussed the issue with upstream: the proper fix is not upstream yet, but
we're pushing for it to get in now that they're aware that the bug actually
affects people (us), and that it doesn't seem to break anything else.

11. Firmware: Mitch Bradley made lots of progress on firmware startup and
power management, which are integrally related due to the common
requirement of Geode MSR setup. You have to do about 300 MSR accesses in
order to get the two Geode chips configured after any kind of power-up or
wakeup. LinuxBIOS was taking about 7 seconds to get everything initialized
before it jumped into Open Firmware. Mitch has that early startup time down
to much less than a second (too fast to measure with a stopwatch), and has
implemented a firmware fastpath boot scheme that cold-boots into the Linux
startup sequence in about 2 seconds (from NAND). That time is down from 23
seconds.

12. Fastboot requires a special boot partition on NAND. There are three
reasonable approaches for partitioning; the current front-runner is a
straightforward partitioning scheme recommended by David Woodhouse, the
same scheme used by the RedBoot loader.

13. The MSR init sequence that is common to both cold boot and
resume-from-RAM (or disk) is down to about 300 microseconds. At this point
Mitch thinks the PLL startup time is going to dominate the resume-from-RAM
time. So far Mitch hasn't found any unresolvable impediment to our goal of
super fast suspend/resume.

14. Mitch also has OFW working in virtual mode (doesn't require fixed ram
addresses) so that, if we choose, OFW can stay resident after Linux starts.
The virtual-mode version is also useful for integrating device-tree support
into Linux. A friend of Mitch's is working on porting the PowerPC Linux
device-tree support into the x86 world.

15. We released a firmware version with the new A62 EC bits from Quanta.

16. Mitch did some performance testing on the Linux start up. It appears
that booting from USB is quite a bit faster than booting from NAND. Just
counting the Linux time, USB gets to Sugar in 70 seconds, whereas NAND
takes 105 seconds. The slowdown is more apparent after the X startup
initiates, suggesting that X+Sugar is more I/O bound than core Linux. This
shows CAFE in ASIC form in BTest-2 and beyond will also improve start up
time. In its current FPGA form, CAFE is significantly faster than the
Geode's built in flash controller was, but still only a fraction of what
the ASIC's performance will enable.

17. Chris Ball tested/described the upgrade procedure from A-Test using
Mitch's updater. He tested our OFW-over-Ethernet (telnet) path with Mitch,
using it to debug a board with a bad DCON; this will help for other
failures, since we cannot use serial at the moment.


Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].
Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].

Revision as of 20:51, 16 December 2006

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.


LAPTOP NEWS

“Our strategic goal is all children should access to communications knowledge within a frame of equality.” -- President Tabaré Vázquez

1. President Tabaré Vázquez officially announced his and the country's intention to enter into OLPC and to provide every child in Uruguay with a laptop within two years. He was joined by the minister of industry and mines, the vice-president, the minister of education, and the president of LATU (the national coordinator for OLPC). He invited a group of schoolchildren to unveil a B1 machine for the gathering. He stated this would be by far the greatest accomplishment of his administration. He ended with a story of how when he was a child, growing up poor and attending public school, when they would see a big car driving down the street, they knew that they had the opportunity to achieve and even to become a doctor and then president, as he did. However, he says now these poor children know they do NOT have that opportunity. It has become no longer possible. OLPC changes that and restores this opportunity, enabling any child to learn and to become what she or he desires. The link to the text of the address (in Spanish) is: http://www.presidencia.gub.uy/_Web/noticias/2006/12/2006121402.htm

2. Brasilia: The Brazilian government convened a new educational strategic advisory group composed of the many experienced people who have done innovative work on computers and learning, some of whom for more than 25 years. Some of them worked with Paulo Freire and Jean Piaget, and one, Jose Valente, was a student of Seymour Papert and Marvin Minsky at the MIT AI Lab. The group was unanimous and effusive in its support for the OLPC concept and is committed to helping the government on all aspects towards a successful deployment.

3. Håkon Wurm Lie reports that the Opera browser is now running nicely on a B1 machine (Instructions can be found on our wiki at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Web_Browser).

4. This week Marco Gritti and Dan Williams started work on the Journal implementation, based on the design work that was done during the previous week. This includes the beginning of the UI and the underlying storage framework.

5. Wireless: Work continues on the wireless driver. Marcelo Tosatti has been fixing more association and scan hangs and is pretty close to getting the driver upstream. He's also cleaned out a large amount of unused code. Once that driver is in a workable state, Marcelo will be spending time working on the out of memory problems that will eventually rear its head and how we handle that at an application level.

6. John got a lot of work done on the images as well. We've moved to the current set of Fedora Core 6 updates and we've got a new kernel in our builds. We've also got builds of the new Cairo and Pango packages and we're going to see if they make a difference in the rendering performance on the machine.

7. Boot time: Chris Blizzard spent some time learning about the device manager that we use on the machine. There is a lot of room for optimization: during startup this segment takes about 15–20 seconds to start up; it is possible we can get that down to 2–5 seconds. In addition, Chris has also done some investigation in how much time it takes to start up the other services that are required on the machine. In conjunction with the work that David Zeuthen continues to do, a 30-second startup time is not unreasonable.

8. The news from the AMD team is excellent process on the X driver; e.g., it now supports dynamic rotation of the screen. In the process, Jordan Crouse extensively cleaned up the driver; he fixed memory allocation, improved setting the mode, fixed debug messages, etc.

9. Performance is now becoming high priority. Chris Ball has updated the tinderbox to work with our B-test setup, and added tinderbox tests to log boot time (tracking times for each of LinuxBIOS –> OFW –> kernel –> init –> X), and to run Python and Cairo benchmarks, to give us a baseline ahead of adding Cairo and Python performance improvements.

10. Andres Salomon merged 2.6.19.1 into the olpc-2.6 tree. We don't have it in an image yet, but it appears to run just fine. He also finally fixed Bug

  1. 520 (No keyboard or mouse input under Qemu or VMWare) and the

i8042-looping-infinitely bug (with a proper fix, not a workaround), released a new kernel, and had j5 incorporate it into Build 196. He has discussed the issue with upstream: the proper fix is not upstream yet, but we're pushing for it to get in now that they're aware that the bug actually affects people (us), and that it doesn't seem to break anything else.

11. Firmware: Mitch Bradley made lots of progress on firmware startup and power management, which are integrally related due to the common requirement of Geode MSR setup. You have to do about 300 MSR accesses in order to get the two Geode chips configured after any kind of power-up or wakeup. LinuxBIOS was taking about 7 seconds to get everything initialized before it jumped into Open Firmware. Mitch has that early startup time down to much less than a second (too fast to measure with a stopwatch), and has implemented a firmware fastpath boot scheme that cold-boots into the Linux startup sequence in about 2 seconds (from NAND). That time is down from 23 seconds.

12. Fastboot requires a special boot partition on NAND. There are three reasonable approaches for partitioning; the current front-runner is a straightforward partitioning scheme recommended by David Woodhouse, the same scheme used by the RedBoot loader.

13. The MSR init sequence that is common to both cold boot and resume-from-RAM (or disk) is down to about 300 microseconds. At this point Mitch thinks the PLL startup time is going to dominate the resume-from-RAM time. So far Mitch hasn't found any unresolvable impediment to our goal of super fast suspend/resume.

14. Mitch also has OFW working in virtual mode (doesn't require fixed ram addresses) so that, if we choose, OFW can stay resident after Linux starts. The virtual-mode version is also useful for integrating device-tree support into Linux. A friend of Mitch's is working on porting the PowerPC Linux device-tree support into the x86 world.

15. We released a firmware version with the new A62 EC bits from Quanta.

16. Mitch did some performance testing on the Linux start up. It appears that booting from USB is quite a bit faster than booting from NAND. Just counting the Linux time, USB gets to Sugar in 70 seconds, whereas NAND takes 105 seconds. The slowdown is more apparent after the X startup initiates, suggesting that X+Sugar is more I/O bound than core Linux. This shows CAFE in ASIC form in BTest-2 and beyond will also improve start up time. In its current FPGA form, CAFE is significantly faster than the Geode's built in flash controller was, but still only a fraction of what the ASIC's performance will enable.

17. Chris Ball tested/described the upgrade procedure from A-Test using Mitch's updater. He tested our OFW-over-Ethernet (telnet) path with Mitch, using it to debug a board with a bad DCON; this will help for other failures, since we cannot use serial at the moment.

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@laptop.org

MILESTONES

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)
Webcast: (Arabic) (English) (French) (original)
Webcast provided by the ITU and UN Webcast Services with the support of RealNetworks Ltd. RealPlayer is required to view the webcast (available at no cost).

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

27 Nov. 2006 Pagina/12| La manera más económica para mejorar la educación
21 Nov. 2006 Official Release|First 1,000 XO-Laptops Roll off the Assembly Line in Shanghai
19 Nov. 2006 Jamaica Gleaner| Technology - a tool for transformation
19 Nov. 2006 International Herald Tribune| One Laptop per Child: Computer designed for those who can least afford them
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review| Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part III
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review| Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part II
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review| Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part I
8 Nov. 2006 Popular Science| Best of What's New 2006: One Laptop per Child XO- Better Screen, Better World
6 Nov. 2006 ZDNet.co.uk | Why Every Child Deserves a Laptop- Matthew Szulik, CEO, Red Hat
27 Oct. 2006 LinuxWorld | Children's Laptop Inspires Open Source Projects
24 Oct. 2006 LA Times | Upward Mobility in a Laptop
24 Oct. 2006 Fortune | This PC wants to save the world
12 Oct. 2006 Bostonist | One Laptop per Child for Libya
11 Oct. 2006 New York Times | U.S. Group Reaches Deal to Provide Laptops to All Libyan Schoolchildren
3 Oct. 2006 GulfNews.com | College gets look at $100 Children's Laptop Computer
25 Sep. 2006 vnunet.com | OLPC offered free satellite connections
14 Sep. 2006 Vanguard | Keyboard In Three Nigerian Languages Ready-Obasanjo
08 Sep. 2006 Technology Review | Hack: The Hundred Dollar Laptop
06 Sep. 2006 nacion.com | Computadoras de $100 estarán listas en el 2007
 Aug. 2006 Wired | The Laptop Crusade
28 Aug. 2006 PCINpact.com | L'OLPC a 100 $ est finalise: un engin hors du commun
21 Aug. 2006 EWeek.com | Knocking Down Barriers to the $100 Laptop
31 Jul. 2006 NPR | Affordable Laptop Computer Project Moves Forward
07 Jul. 2006 San Diego Union-Tribune | U.S. and international educators show great interest in prototype
Jul. 2006 SPIE Professional | $100 laptop nears launch
21 Jun. 2006 BusinessWeek online | For Brazil's Poor, a Digital Deliverance?
24 May 2006 CNET News.com | $100 laptop gets working prototype
07 Apr. 2006 rediff.com | Our $100 laptops will run on human power
02 Apr. 2006 O Estado de S.Paulo | Fazer a diferença
28 Mar. 2006 FT.com | Waking up to a laptop revolution
24 Mar. 2006 Diário do Comércio | Um Laptop por Crianca
22 Mar. 2006 Times Online | Getting the world's poor logged on
09 Mar. 2006 Correio Popular | País disputa fabricação de laptop de US$ 100
  Folha de S. Paulo | Governo quer comprar 1 milhão de laptops
  Info Exame On Line | Governo quer um milhão de laptops de US$ 100
08 Mar. 2006 IDG Now | Faculdade abre programa de inclusão digital para alunos
  Folha de S. Paulo | Governo negocia fabricação do laptop de US$ 100 no Brasil
  Agência Globo | Governo estuda possibilidade de produção de computador de US$ 100 no país
  Teletime News | DVB detalha contrapartidas oferecidas ao Brasil
05 Mar. 2006 ACM/CIE | Interview with Nicholas Negroponte on the $100 laptop
16 Feb. 2006 MITIR | Podcast of Walter Bender's MURJ lecture on One Laptop per Child
15 Feb. 2006 CNET | PCs for the poor: Which design will win?
10 Feb. 2006 CNET | Perspective: Will the $100 PC fly?
09 Feb. 2006 NYTimes | A Plug for the Unplugged $100 Laptop Computer for Developing Nations
  UPI | One Laptop Project reaches critical stages
31 Jan. 2006 Slashdot | Microsoft OS Smart Phone for Developing Nations
  USA Today | Gates sees cellphones as way to help Third World
  Macworld | Red Hat officially commits to MIT's $100 laptop
20 Dec. 2005 BusinessWeek online | Quanta faces challenges in making "millions and millions" of $100 laptops.
19 Dec. 2005 Forbes.com | China to decide by March whether to join OneLaptopPerChild project.
14 Dec. 2005 UPI | Nortel to take part in OneLaptopPerChild endeavor.
13 Dec. 2005 Red Herring | Quanta to manufacture laptops; expects deliveries in 2006 4th quarter.
11 Dec. 2005 NYTimes | NY Times: 5th Annual Year in Ideas $100 Laptop
01 Dec. 2005 RFDESIGN | $100 Laptops Feature Novel Peer-to-Peer Wireless Connectivity
30 Nov. 2005 FT.com | Five companies in Asia making bids to manufacture $100 laptop.
28 Nov. 2005 Fortune Magazine | THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: I'd Like to Teach the World to Type
25 Nov. 2005 People's Daily Online | Nigerian president says government has budgeted for a million $100 laptops.
17 Nov. 2005 BBC News | UN Debut for $100 Laptop for Poor
  Seattle Times | $100 Laptops Aim to Bring Children the World
  TechWhack | MIT Unveils their USD 100 Laptop
  ZDNet | '$100 Laptops' Here by Next Year
  ABC | $100 Laptop Bridges Digital Divide
  Financial Express | Laptop @$100!
16 Nov. 2005 MIT News Office | Annan to Present Prototype $100 Laptop at World Summit on Information Society
  CNET | $100 Laptop Takes World Stage
  CNET | $100 Laptop Expected in Late 2006
  Christian Science Monitor | A Low-Cost Laptop for Every Child
14 Nov. 2005 WSJ | The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality
13 Nov. 2005 The Inquirer | Hubris over $100 Laptop idea
New York Times | Google Earmarks $265million for Charity and Social Causes
13 Oct. 2005 Technology Review | The Hundred Dollar Man: Technology Review's editor in chief, Jason Pontin, talk with Nicholas Negroponte about the Hundred Dollar Computer.
29 Sep. 2005 I4U News | Sub-$100 Laptop design unveiled
28 Sep. 2005 Boston Globe | Prototypes of $100 laptop with hand crank planned by early next year.
  MIT World | NN at Technology Review
27 Sep. 2005 Datamation | Low cost PCs for the Enterprise
06 Jun. 2005 estadao.com.br | Cada criança na escola com um laptop a tiracolo

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

Retrieved from "http://wiki.laptop.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=OLPC:News&oldid=18407"