Announce: OLPC software strategy.

[Andrew van der Stock]

Hi Chris,

Can we work on QEMU with the F12 / F13 ARM port to emulate user land of XO 1.75 and Sugar? I think that would be helpful to get things bootstrapped earlier than waiting for more dev boards to arrive if an emulation mechanism could be developed. 

In terms of the PS/2 closed source code - is the XO 1.75 going to use this ancient connector at all? I'd hate to see folks waste time reverse engineering closed source, even if it's likely to be a few hundreds of lines if that. 

I'd be interested in helping if I could. I have experience writing X11 drivers (way back in the 1990's on the old Matrox cards) and low level printer drivers (pnm2ppa is one of mine), and did a bit of porting of ReiserFS to Alpha on Suse Linux for Alpha back in the day. 

thanks,
Andrew

On 08/07/2010, at 8:01 AM, Chris Ball wrote:

> Hi,
> [snip]
> XO-1.75 and beyond:
> ===================
> [snip]
> We've started to help with Fedora ARM by adding five new build
> machines (lent to OLPC by Marvell; thanks!) to the Fedora ARM koji
> build farm, and we have Fedora 12 and Sugar 0.86 running on early 1.75
> development boards.  We'd prefer to use Fedora 13 for the XO-1.75, but
> it hasn't been built for ARM yet -- if anyone's interested in helping
> out with this or other Fedora ARM work, please check out the Fedora
> ARM page on the Fedora Wiki².  We're also interested in hiring ARM and
> Fedora developers to help with this; if you're interested in learning
> more, please send an e-mail to jobs-engineering at laptop.org.
> 
> We'll also be continuing to use Open Firmware on the XO-1.75, and
> Mitch Bradley has an ARM port of OFW running on our development boards
> already.
> 
> EC-1.75 open source EC code:
> ============================
> 
> OLPC is proud to announce that the XO-1.75 embedded controller will
> have an open codebase (with a small exception, see below).  After much
> behind-the-scenes effort, EnE has agreed to provide us with a public
> version of the KB3930 datasheet and is allowing our new code to be
> made public.
> 
> The code is not available yet due to a few chunks of proprietary code
> that need to be purged and some other reformatting.  A much more
> detailed announcement will be provided once the new code is pushed to
> a public repository.  The code will be licensed under the GPL with a
> special exception for OLPC use.
> 
> The exception is because EnE has not released the low-level details on
> the PS/2 interface in the KB3930, so there will be some code that is
> not available -- relative to the codebase this is a very small amount
> of code.  The GPL licensing exception will allow for linking against
> this closed code.  We're going to investigate ways to move away from
> this code in the future.  (As far as we're aware, this will make the
> XO-1.75 the first laptop with open embedded controller code!)
>