OLPC:News
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 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.
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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) |
| 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
