OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Abuja, Nigeria: A significant milestone was reached when approximately one- hundred laptops were handed out to children in Nigerian test school, Galadima. The laptops were received with smiles, curiosity, and giggles. The most popular feature in the first hour the children spent with their laptops was the mesh view. As of this moment, one-hundred families in the Nigerian Galadima community will have spent part of their family time around the laptops, with the children proudly explaining how they work.
2. Buenos Aires: David Cavallo, Rodrigo Mesquita, and Walter Bender participated a series of five half-day workshops for a variety of audiences. The attending groups included key people in government, education, and software development, as well as events for the press and general public. Alejandro Piscitelli and Laura Serra of educ.ar contributed greatly to the discussions and development of ideas. Valter Cegal and Rebecca Gonzales of AMD also participated.
3. New York: Sj Klein met with representatives from UNICEF, which is developing projects for UNIWiki, an effort to coordinate shared free knowledge produced internally and by others (e.g., Voices of Youth). They are especially interested in focusing on projects in developing nations, with attention to multilingualism, mentoring, and cross-cultural communication.
4. Washington: The Library of Congress World Digital Library is asking their network of librarians and curators to join the OLPC curation efforts, in the subjects and languages that most interest them.
5. Mesh activities: Dan Williams and the Collabora team continue to work on the Presence Service, a key to developing mesh-enabled activities. They are making good progress, building out the APIs and testing the libraries under our framework.
6. Startup screen: Dan also found time to put together a new startup screen for the laptop that takes a child's picture.
7. Bug hunting: Marcelo Tosatti investigated and located the source of the iperf-corruption problem we were seeing on some of the laptops under heavy load. It turned out to be the result of a fix in the networking driver. Marcelo has also been investigating and working on implementations to tell activities on the machine when they are running out of memory and give them a chance to release caches or shut down.
8. UI: Marco Gritti and Tomeu Vizoso have been making progress on Sugar. The current builds have a large number of fixes and changes over what shipped with the Build-239 machines; people will be pleasantly surprised. Tomeu has been working largely on underlying widgets and infrastructure and Marco has been busy working on higher-level constructs, including working with Eben Eliason to firm up design decisions. The new Sugar has a better default font, moves a lot of the networking into the home page, includes a Journal demo, and rollover information for the activities that should greatly help with usability and first impressions.
9. Music Activities: The TamTam team has been hard at work improving the music program as well. The new version exposes the track editor and is much more interesting than previous versions.
10. Trial-1: We have been working toward a new stable build that will form the basis of our first tests in the field. Andres Salomon branched a stable tree (http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/stable/).
11. School server: The software architecture of the school servers is starting to come together, through discussions this week around the networking services provided and possible scaling mechanisms. For Trial-1, the networking will remain IPv4, with the school server providing DHCP, DNS, HTTP cache, and NAT functionality. Hardware for school server development has arrived in Cambridge, with plans to have a limited prototype up and running over the next week.
12. Marc Fiuczynky of PlanetLab (Princeton University) visited to discuss lessons learned by PlanetLab. Herbert Poeztl, who developed the virtual-server mechanism (Vserver) used by PlanetLab, has been working at OLPC to help integrate it with our software. (Vserver is a Linux technology for "containerization" of environments that will be very useful in the future for both management and increased security.)
13. Suspend/Resume and Power Management: Mitch Bradley has been working on bringing up resume in OpenFirmware. He has dismantled and instrumented a B2 with the following results:
- the long delay from power/wakeup to CPU on is down to 12mS (instead
of 500mS—probably a CAFE FPGA turn-on delay);
- we no longer sees random hard-hangs;
- a problem with the DCON wiring with respect to wake-up was found; and
- resume-from-RAM was having problems by is now seemingly reliable.
The current time from power-reapplied to completion of the wakeup procedure is 27.6mS. Mitch knows an easy way to knock off another 4.5mS , to bring the core wakeup time down about 23mS. It is conceivable that he might manage to shave off a few more milliseconds, but probably not much. It is very tightly coded as is, and the "long poles" are hardware delays like PLL startup and ROM access time for early instructions. This time does not include video subsystem restart time, so additional time will be needed for that.
14. Performance: Chris Ball and Dave Woodhouse worked on a booting-performance problem. The JFFS2 kernel-thread-speed problem is resolved. Booting a current build on a B2 machine takes 2 minutes 2 seconds, but drops to 1 minute 24 seconds with the work around for the USB branch-prediction problem (reported last week), and now drops to 1 minute 6 seconds with a fix to the scheduling for the JFFS2 kernel thread. This scheduling fix should go into the build soon. Chris Ball also added graphing of Python performance over time to the tinderbox.
15. Network: Michail Bletsas setup a 14-node mesh testbed at OLPC and spent last week with Cozybit and Marvell debugging the mesh firmware and the wireless driver. As of Friday night all of the major problems have been addressed to the point that the mesh functionality is now usable:
- in-mesh multi-hop multicast support;
- link-loss detection and route tear-down with RERR messages (This
improves route-restoration time);
- mesh transmission rate is done a the highest-available rate for each
hop (The rate for each hop is determined when the route is discovered);
- deferred route discovery (Route discovery is now done by a lower
priority task, which reduces the variance of transmission time);
- WDS problem workaround (Wireless interface will accept WDS replies
from WDS-enabled access points. This will only work with APs that have a different MAC OUI than the XO's [Ticket #901]).
- fixing flow control for the mesh interface on the libertas driver
alleviated the problems with high-data-rate TCP flow corruption (Ticket #915).
16. IPv6: In preparation for integration of laptops and servers, OLPC has started working on our IPv6 implementation. Chris helped Dave Woodhouse with setting up "tubes," the machine running our IPv6 testbed. All XOs and other systems able to support IPv6 in the Cambridge office now get public IPv6 addresses by default, thanks to Dave Woodhouse and our new intern systems administartor Daniel Jared Dominguez.
17. Power management: The power-rail measurement system arrived this week. We now have in house equipment that can measure the current on all power rails of a B2 board to an accuracy of about 1mA. Richard Smith will start taking measurements on each rail and testing the suspend-resume code. In addition to current measurement this equipment has can control several relay contacts. These can be connected to power switches on the laptop. All of the measurements and outputs can be controlled remotely by Ethernet, serial, or USB. We therefore have the ability to build a new tinderbox that can automatically test nand image builds and firmware upgrades, while taking power measurements on every power rail during the entire process. Previously we could not test firmware upgrades automatically because we did not have a good power-cycle method/restart-after- flash method.
18. Kernel: Andres synced up our kernel with the 2.6.21-rc2 release. Andres also fixed a bug in the interaction between the rpm spec file and dynticks that was breaking system tap. With that fixed, tinderbox should work with 2.6.21-rc2 properly and can properly benchmark jffs2 and the SD driver. There is a pending bug in the SD driver for which he has prepared a patch but cannot test until he can actually benchmark. Andres "thinks" the dynticks bug is fixed (Ticket #954), and the jffs2 bug (which adds 30 seconds to the boot time, as discovered by Chris Blizzard) is still pending. Zephaniah Hull and Jim Gettys "fixed" the touch-pad bug. Jordan Crouse of AMD has been developing driver patches for suspend and resume and is further investigating the USB performance problem. Andres also did some investigation of the USB performance problem; he and Jordan discussed how the hardware would implement uncached memory and poked around the kernel code for ways to easily do it.
19. From the community: Andrew Clunis reports that a reasonably functional version of the Develop activity is now available in sugar-jhbuild (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Develop). It provides a very basic "IDE"—a file TreeView and text editor, currently provided by GtkSourceView.
20. Policy discussion: A new mailing list, aop@laptop.org, has been set up to host community discussions about policy decisions: everything from the OLPC security model to our position regarding FOSS. You participation is welcome.
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
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Press requests: please send email to press@laptop.org
MILESTONES
| Feb. 2007 | B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries. |
| Jan. 2007 | Rwanda announced its participation in the project. |
| 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
PRESS RELEASES
| Jan. 2007 | OLPC has No Plans to Commercialize XO Computer. |
| Jan. 2007 | OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer. |
| Jan. 2007 | Rwanda Commits to One Laptop per Child Initiative. |
| Dec. 2006 | Low Cost Laptop Could Tranform Learning. |
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found.)
http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html | Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop, GLOBO- BRASIL
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
http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html | A Brief Demo