A technical assessment of porting "Sugar" to Windows.

[Ivan Krstić]

On Apr 24, 2008, at 2:32 PM, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> That said, our Journal and datastore are in need of a rewrite.[...]
> This course requires skilled Windows developers who are comfortable  
> with NTFS reparse points and/or filesystem development on Windows.   
> Developing a single implementation which is cross-platform is likely  
> more difficult.

The datastore wasn't ever _supposed_ to be a real filesystem, and so  
it could do various Unthinkable Things in normal FS land, such as only  
exposing a HTTP REST API which gets used through whatever frontend is  
convenient, e.g. FUSE on Unix. If such an implementation existed, you  
could temporarily half-ass a Windows frontend via, say, WebDAV, which  
Windows (AFAIK) supports treating like a filesystem OOB.

> This is extremely unlikely to ever work on Sugar/Windows.  The changes
> to the XP kernel are too extensive, and the XP product has already
> reached its end-of-life point, making the return on investment very
> small.

In meetings with Microsoft, they stated unambiguously that they are  
unprepared to make _any_ changed to the XP kernel, which is a shipped  
product, to accommodate the XO. Only changes that can be introduced  
through normal 3rd-party extension mechanisms (such as drivers) are  
acceptable, which means overreaching power management changes are out  
of the question entirely.

> We believe that basic sound support for the XO has been implemented in
> the existing Windows XP port.  I am not certain of the state of
> camera and microphone support.  If not yet implemented, these also
> require contributions from experienced Windows kernel developers with
> access to the Windows XP source.

Why do you think this requires source access and can't be handled by  
regular drivers?

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org