[Community-news] OLPC News (2007-02-24)

[Walter Bender]

1. Salvador, Bahia: XO goes to Carnaval. Joselito Crispim, founder of
the community group Baguncaco, a long-time collaborator of David
Cavallo, introduced musicians Carlinhos Brown and Chico Cesar, both of
who support community efforts in culture, development, and education.
Brown and Joselito are teaming up to work with the new governor of the
state, a close friend of President Lula, to bring the XO to these
disenfranchised neighborhoods of Salvador. Likewise, Chico Cesar
committed to bring the XO to João Pessoa. They appreciated the
emphasis on creative expression, construction, and mesh-enabled
collaboration. These artists/community activists immediately saw the
benefits for for learning and inclusion.

2. USB: This week a large part of the software technical team chased a
problem in the Geode GX CPU that is causing a 30% slowdown during
certain kinds of USB transactions, including the one that our wireless
interface uses. The effect is clear: software runs much slower than it
should. A preliminary workaround shows 25% improvement. Further
investigation is underway.

3. Wireless: Javier Cardona and Luis Carlos Cobo from Cozybit spent
part of the week at OLPC testing and debugging the mesh firmware with
Michail Bletsas and Marcelo Tosatti. Together, they were able to
consistently recreate intermittent problems and pinpoint their causes.
They were joined on Wednesday by Ronak Chockshi and Ramya
Chandrasekaran from Marvell's OLPC Q&A team who are stepping up their
testing efforts.

The firmware now supports multicast frames and we have the network
neighborhood working on XO laptop at OLPC over the mesh interface. The
current firmware also does not drop any packets when communication is
first initiated between two nodes.

The wireless driver has been submitted to the netdev-2.6 tree, and
John Linville, who is a Red Hat employee and the upstream wireless
maintainer, is looking to try to get it into 2.6.22. This will make
our long term support for the kernel much easier, and is an important
milestone that reflects the work that has gone into the driver.

4. Dan Williams spent a few days working with Collabora working on
mesh and networking issues.  They specified a new set of APIs and what
needed to be done to support connecting to servers to get mesh-like
functionality. This will be required at larger schools and to support
inter-school connections. Activities will be able to connect between
people on a one-to-one or one-to-many basis and work is already
underway to support this in both the back-end library we'll be using
and the server that we'll be prototyping on.

5. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti made progress on the Sugar UI
widget system. They created the infrastructure needed for menus and
rollovers and they placed pop-up activation logic in the controls so a
control can choose between menu-like activation, rollover-like, or a
custom one. In parallel, Eben Eliason has been exploring how we might
best make use of pie menus. Marco also started on the infrastructure
for adding devices to the home page, and worked with Dan and the
Collabora team on the new mesh and networking interfaces.

6. Firmware: In support of wireless boot, Lilian Walter has the Open
Firmware (OFW) wireless driver working in managed mode in the
following additional security modes: WiFi protected access (WPA-PSK),
cipher-type temporal key- integrity protocol (TKIP), and WPA2-PSK,
cipher-type TKIP. Next up is to implement cipher-type advanced
encryption standard (AES).

Mitch Bradley has Fastboot/VSA-less firmware is working and is
entering internal test phase. We expect full deployment after a week
of testing; kernel changes to support VSA-less operation have been
integrated and appear in this week's OS build. Richard Smith has built
and tested a ROM with this enabled.

7. JFFS2 file system: Chris Ball and Dave Woodhouse are investigating
the [jffs2_gcd_mtd0] thread, which is slowing down both our boot time
and performance directly after boot by tenѕ of seconds.

8. Jim Gettys and Chris Ball worked on reorganizing and preparing
BTest-2 release notes, as BTest-2 systems are now shipping.

9. Kernel: Andres Salomon reports that the dynamic-tick patches (and
Geode- timer patches) are now in the experimental kernel. We have also
synchronized the kernel with 2.6.21-rc1, that will have become master.
 This means that rather than the 2.6.19 kernel we have been running,
OS images will start including 2.6.21-rc1 (with dynticks and support
for VSA-less firmware). This paves the way for the power management
work we are looking to do. Richard and Mitch prepared a fast-boot
firmware that requires an experimental kernel, and booting the machine
was an order of magnitude faster.

10. X Windows: John Watlington documented the process of launching
Sugar on a remote display. This paves the way for remote debugging and
projecting Sugar from a machine with an external video port.

11. Games: John Palmieri has started a project called Block Party
(based upon Vadim Gerasimov's Tetris-like game with mesh functionality
for the laptop). John moved the drawing code to use Cairo instead of
GDK graphics contexts. The repository will be the basis for a
Sugar-activity tutorial John is writing. Vadim, Brian and Barry
Silverman, and Walter played Dazzle Star, a multi-player network game
originally written by Hal Abelson in 1975, that Brian and Barry ported
to run on the laptop. Vadim was in Sydney, Brian and Barry in
Montreal, and Walter in Cambridge. Walter and Brian won 12 to 11.

-walter

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