[Community-news] OLPC News (2007-03-24)

[Walter Bender]

We've made a decision to use the AMD Geode LX for the mass-production machine!

1. A team including Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, Jordan Crouse (AMD),
Matthew Garrett (Cambridge), Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, David
Woodhouse, Tom Sylla, and Marcelo Tosatti succeeded in the initial
"bring up" of suspend and resume.

2. São Paulo: David Cavallo gave a talk at the Catholic University of
São Paulo (PUC-SP). The majority of those attending were people from
the education and technology program, the curriculum program, the
program for indigenous education, and the mathematics department.
Included in the group were former colleagues of Paulo Freire, who
maintain the Freire House at the university. The discussion among
people who have worked long and hard for education reform and equity
was excellent and pragmatic, focused on learning from the difficulties
of the past.

3. Sugar: Everyone on the Sugar team is working toward an
end-of-the-month deadline. Over the last two weeks, Marco Gritti,
Tomeu Visoso, John Palmieri, Dan Williams, and the Abiword team have
made numerous improvements to the interface.

For Sugar itself, the frame behavior is getting much better—we have
made changes based on feedback from the field. Specifically, the
heuristics for when the frame is shown and hidden automatically are
much more consistent. Rollovers have a much better feel to them and
many random performance problems have been fixed.

The team also spent time setting up activity file dialogs; this
includes saving entire web pages, images from web pages (from a right
click), saving and opening inside the document editor, and the image
editor. While file dialogs will eventually be supplanted by the
Journal, it helps with usability in the short term.

Abiword now supports image loading and floating the images anywhere in
a document. This should let kids create their own documents based on
images they find on the web.

Marco and Tomeu have also started adding support for
internationalizing those few text strings that do exist in the
interface. SJ Klein is organizing a team of people interested in
helping with the translations.

Dan has been integrating the mesh functionality into Network Manager.
This includes fixing problems in the driver, adding new functionality
to Network Manager, and creating the user interface to support it.
Pentagram has been iterating on a design for visual feedback for the
various network states and modes.

We are approaching a stage of stability in development such that we
need to seriously investigating how to enable a wider network of
developers. This includes people who want to hack on the base system
itself as well as people who want to write activities for the XO. For
the latter, we are going to build images that people can download and
run in emulators that are available for just about every platform
these days. John will be working more on this over the next week.

4. Suspend/resume: Chris Ball measured resume time at 900ms with
drivers unloaded and 1400ms with all drivers loaded, according to the
kernel. Linux 2.6 currently performs a slow virtual-terminal switch on
suspend/resume, which may account for much or most of this delay we
will immediately eliminate this switch, as we don't need it. In
contrast, resuming conventional laptops running Linux on processors
many times faster than our system are measured at 6–12 seconds, so we
are already many times faster than most systems. Both the power-draw
numbers and suspend/resume-time numbers will head downwards as we
start optimizing power management. Mitch Bradley has measured the
firmware resume time of approximately 25 milliseconds.

5. Firmware: The firmware end of the suspend/resume code seems to have
held up well in this week's kernel testing. Lilian Walters did some
work on memtest86 so it can be integrated into the ROMs, giving us a
heavy-duty memory test capability that will always be available. Mitch
made good progress on the firmware port to the LX; the firmware is
interactive and he is now resolving MSR (model-specific register)
discrepancies. He expects to have a releasable OFW for the LX
development board soon.

6. Kernel: Andres Salomon notes that there is a separate source branch
for the suspend/resume and power management work:

http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=olpc-2.6;a=shortlog;h=powermgmt

Once the code is ready, it will all end up in both the master and
stable branches.

Andres updated our kernels to 2.6.21-rc4 (previously 2.6.21-rc2), and
merged libertas driver changes. Andres also cleaned up the MFGPT
(multi-function general-purpose timers) driver, as these are drivers
that we would like to get upstream.

7. Cozybit released a new developer version of the wireless firmware
(5.220.10.p1). The driver patches required for correct behavior of FWT
and mesh commands are found at:

	http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/libertas-dev/2007-March/000324.html
	http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/libertas-dev/2007-March/000325.html

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