Fwd: The XO-1.5 software plan.

[Tiago Marques]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tiago Marques <tiagomnm at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, May 16, 2009 at 6:18 PM
Subject: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
To: bens at alum.mit.edu


On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz <
bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

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> Chris Ball wrote:
> > We have some good news:  OLPC has decided to base its software release
> > for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11.  Unlike previous releases, we
> > plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving
> > users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead.
> > (This will mostly be useful for older kids in high school.)
> >
> > I'm particularly happy about this plan because it will allow us to
> > catch up with the awesome work present in the Sugar community's most
> > recent release, Sugar 0.84, as well as merging the latest Fedora work
> > and including GNOME into the mix for the first time.  The new machines
> > will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both
> > environments at once.
>

Hi,

Where does rainbow and bitfrost come in all of this?


>
> This raises an interesting question: should we still be using a compressed
> filesystem?  On the XO-1, an uncompressed FS was essentially not an
> option.  There would be almost no space left for users' files after the
> uncompressed system files.  Unfortunately, this causes tremendous
> slowdowns all over the system, as it causes reads from flash to (a) be
> CPU-limited, and (b) compete with the rest of the system for CPU time.
> Writes are even worse.
>
> On the 1.5, we will have more space (so less need for compression), but
> more system files, and also more CPU to handle it.  I think we should
> remember to test the final images both with and without compression.
>

The 1GHz C7 is still a slow cpu, as it seems from reviews of similar
netbooks:

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4352

For most tasks it is slower than an 600MHz Celeron M and that's not exactly
fast. Does anyone more familiar with the hardware have any idea of how fast
it is when compared to the Geode?


>
> Of course, this equation gets still more complicated depending on whether
> we have MTD or FTL flash.  Choosing a filesystem will be an interesting
> exercise.


Is MTD still up for discussion? Wasn't it going to be FTL?

Best regards,

Tiago Marques


>
>
> - --Ben
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