[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-09-16)

[Walter Bender]

Major events of the week:

1. Nicholas, Khaled Hassounah, Michail Bletsas, SJ Klein, and Stephen
Michaud participated in Nigeria's two-day Digital Africa Conference, with
one or the other of them being the keynote speaker, chairman, or panelist
literally in every session. OLPC was omnipresent in the press and for the
400 delegates from 30 countries.

2. Alan Kay, Kim Rose, and the eToys team spent the week in Cambridge at
the OLPC offices. They continue to make rapid progress towards the
integration of eToys into the laptop software environment (they also
provided useful feedback) and have eToys running on the laptop. Ian
Piumarta gave the OLPC team an update on his “dynamically reconfigurable
virtual machine”, which may be—in the longer term—the basis of  programming
environment for the Laptop, in that it is simple, fast, extremely flexible
and quite eloquent.

3. Welcome Jenn Lucien to OLPC. Jenn will be working with the
administrative team and covering the reception area. Originally from O`ahu,
she served as the office manager to the Hawai`i Legislative Committee on
Energy and Environmental Protection for five years. She spent the last year
traveling in Asia and the Pacific and is excited join a project that aims
to help the developing world. She holds a BA in Communication Studies from
University of California at Santa Barbara.

4. Mark Foster reports that the CAFE ASIC debugging has proceeded well
beyond expectations. To begin with, all three subsystems (NAND Flash, SD
card slot, and camera controller) were already functional, with full DMA
capability, by the time of the scheduled CAFE FPGA debugging /start/ date.
Following the very successful debugging sessions by the software team, the
CAFE is being enhanced to improve its capabilities and to simplify software
development and robustness. As one example, the SD card controller is being
modified to strictly match the public SDHCI specification. To the best of
our knowledge, this should be the first truly Open Source SD
implementation, with no need to obtain an SDI license or sign NDAs to
create SD drivers or applications.

5. Mark also reports that the team has decided to extend support for USB
2.0. Initially, the Laptop was designed to offer support for limited power
consumption USB devices in order to ensure sufficient battery life. After
real-world experience with the prototype systems, it has been decided to
remove this artificial power limitation and support full 2.5W power
consumption on each of the three USB ports simultaneously, or even higher
power consumption per port when all three ports are not being used (in
fact, going beyond the power limits of the USB specification). These
changes should significantly expand the universe of supported USB devices
and peripherals.

6. Jim Gettys reports that Carl-Daniel Hailfinger and the LinuxBIOS team
have implemented the LZMA compression system
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZMA) for the BIOS ROM, resulting in a
substantial savings in size.

7. Zephaniah Hull got the X driver for the touchpad functioning last
weekend. Andres Salomon started contracting with OLPC this week and worked
with
Jim on setting up an X Window System build environment for debugging the
touchpad. Next: experimentation on how to use the novel capabilities of the
device.

8. John Zulauf, formerly of AMD's Geode team, has worked with AMD to free
the optimization work—100–200% improvement—he did on many basic library
functions: memcmp; memcpy; memset; strcmp; strcpy; and strlen. We look
forward to integrating these performance improvements.

-walter
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Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org