[Community-news] OLPC News (2007-02-11)

[Walter Bender]

1. Ivan Krstić released the OLPC security specification this week.
(Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bitfrost for an overview.) The
specification will go through a rigorous review process in parallel
with coding and testing, which has already begun.

2. Firmware: Mitch Bradley is making progress on the fastboot/resume
infrastructure, with a power-up-to-running-Linux-kernel time of three
seconds. He is also tracking down a problem with the USB2 driver in
the kernel; it behaves strangely with the fastboot underpinnings.

3. Kernel: Linus Torvalds released 2.6.20 on Sunday. Andres Salomon
merged it into an experimental build.

4. Performance: Chris Ball isolated a long-standing Python performance
problem to our use of the -fPIC compiler flag. When we switch to the
next release of Python, Version 2.5, which we have scheduled for later
in the month, we should see a speedup of up to 40% under high load,
plus an improvement to Python's startup time.

5. Chris also added automated graphing support to the Tinderbox, which
now displays graphs of boot time and X11 performance on the main
Tinderbox page.  This will make regressions stick out, and is already
displaying a recent slowdown in boot time. The next steps for the
tinderbox are automated power-rail measurements in the Tinderbox.

6. The PepperPad team compared our performance to theirs, and found
that our GX-500/366MHz is being outperformed by a reference board
running a GX-466/333MHz. The benchmarks make it look like memory
bandwidth is involved—perhaps we are setting our memory timings too
conservatively? Chis and Richard Smith will investigate.

7. Jeremy Lueck has built the "$10 Laptop" by putting a Linux OS image
running Sugar on a USB stick. Porting to a virtual machine allows the
Sugar OS software to be run on any hardware that supports the virtual
machine: Moka5's LivePC engine. (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Virtualized_Sugar for details).

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