OLPC News 2007-12-22

[Carl-Daniel Hailfinger]

On 22.12.2007 17:32, Walter Bender wrote:
> 2. Hinge: Jacques Gagne has been investigating the laptop hinge—the
> "clearance" between the two rotating parts should be tighter and this
> would reduce wobble. Mary Lou Jepsen and Quanta are investigating a
> possible run-in change at the earliest possible date.
>   

Wasn't the clearance made wider sometime between B1 and B2 to fix the
problem with interlocking plastic parts? Please explain further.

> 7. Embedded controller: Richard Smith spent time studying oscilloscope
> traces looking for a possible cause of the reopening of Ticket 1835
> (unable to resume); recent software builds were failing on the
> suspend/resume testbed. He has been unable to reproduce the problem
> with bare-board tests and he now feels that he fully understand the
> software causes of 1835 (three distinct causes). Running the latest EC
> code with Joyride kernels doesn't seem to have the problem. Richard
> and John will continue to run tests on the suspend/resume testbed to
> insure that we won't have the problem with Update.1
>
> A second bonus was discovery and verification of EC issues that Chris
> Ball and Jim Gettys have run into. Andres helped Richard find an EC
> bug where the SCI mask was getting corrupted. The most frequent
>   

Is this a hardware or software bug?

> manifestation of that was the loss of AC events or battery-charge
> level.  Richard still don't know the root cause of the corruption, but
> has a good test case and kernel debug logs. There appears to be a case
> where EC communication fails and error recover is not working. Fixing
> it is going to involve more oscilloscope time, because turning on
> serial- port debugging appears to make the problem go away. There is
> already a workaround in the kernel to fix the mask when it becomes
> corrupted, so it's not a show-stopper.
>
> Richard is also writing some cron scripts that will take a snapshot of
> the battery ACR while the laptop is running on battery power and then
> then send us the data. Richard wants to use these data to build power
> usage profiles. The ACR gives us a very accurate reading on the amount
> of mA/h drawn from the battery.  Plotting it over time will begin to
> give us insight on our dynamic power draw.
>   

This may have been asked before, but how far is the progress in freeing
the EC code? IIRC first there were official statements that the EC code
would be free (and all parties would agree to that), then after some
time it was announced that OLPC were talking with Quanta about setting
the code free, now we just hear about EC bugs, but nothing about the code.


Regards,
Carl-Daniel