Palm Foleo is Dead
Well... From my last post I reported that Palm had announced the development environment for for the Palm Foleo was stripped version of Wind River's WorkBench product. I also stated that I thought that shipping the Foleo with a 2.4 kernel was a mistake given that 2.6 has been around for over 3 years now. In addition, I commented that the WorkBench environment cost as much as the Foleo itself, so I didn't know how that was going to fly in the open source community. Well, less than 2 hours after I made that post, Palm canceled the Foleo and made the claim that part of the rationale for canceling the Foleo was that the development environment was "too different" from their current and previous products.
Palm now claims that they are going to take a $10MM hit to write off the Foleo and begin working on the Foleo II. When I spoke to the Palm folks at LinuxWorld, I had suggested that they have an ultra-cheap development environment based on standard GNU tools to entice the hobbyist and traditional Linux developers to write/port code to the platform. Maybe that's what they'll come up with for this next product.
In spite of the issues with the Foleo, I believe that the time has come for a non-x86 based ultra-portable that runs Linux. A product like the Foleo (or new Foleo II) could be the impetus for non-x86 Linux to really start to take off and start on-par with the x86 flavor. Let's hope that even though this one is dead, that the next product, whether it's from Palm or someone else, is better thought out with the needs of the Linux development community in mind.
LinuxWorld and Mobile Devices
Greetings!
It's been about 6 weeks since my last posting. Sorry for the delay, but I've been at LinuxWorld and spent the past couple of weeks in Alaska with my family. Alaska was awesome. But, since I didn't strike it rich panning for gold, I'll have to keep working my day job :-).
The topic of this posting is LinuxWorld. This is the traditional gathering of all things Linux in San Francisco, CA. Typically, this show is comprised of people in penguin suits, mock battles between the distribution supporters (SUSE vs. Red Hat, etc.) and a lot of geek games. However, there was a very different feel to it this year. This year the show seemed to be dominated by the business types.
First, LinuxWorld was being held in conjunction with the Next Generation Data Center (NGDC) conference. The NGDC conference is all about how data centers are evolving and what technologies such as virtualization are going to do to the data center. I'll talk more about virtualization in an upcoming post. Suffice to say at this point that virtualization will be a factor in most of our lives at some point or other in the near future.
However, the other trend I spotted at LinuxWorld was the emphasis on the use of Linux in mobile applications. There were no less than three separate day-long presentations on the use of Linux in the mobile space. Motorola, Access and Wind River were all there talking about their strategies for Linux in mobile applications.
Motorola was handing out developer's kits for their new Linux-based phones like the Razor V8. I saw one of these phones running... I might retire my Treo to get one. It was quite slick.
Access (http://www.access-company.com) was showing their PalmOS-like layer for Linux. They are very specific about the fact that it's not PalmOS running on Linux ala emulation. But, most of us will not be able to tell the difference. And, our favorite PalmOS apps will run on their product! Now, to get a device that actually runs this...
Wind River Systems also had a day wherein they talked about their WorkBench product and their strategy for Linux in the mobile space. Of course, WR's WorkBench is based on Eclipse with many enhancements from earlier products such as SNIFF+. WorkBench is really a nice implementation for cross development. It runs in both Windoze and Linux and it has support for WR's JTAG solution. So, you can go from new board bring up to applications development in one environment. I just wish they could bring the per-seat price down to something affordable to small companies.
However, along those lines, WR is providing the development environment for the new Palm Foleo devices. These gizmos are either small, ultra-portable laptops, or they're really big Sidekicks depending on how you look at them. Based on the ARM processor, the Foleo has a pretty good keyboard and a decent screen and is targeted at those folks who don't need a full-blown laptop, but hate accessing the Internet on their phone. Unfortunately, Palm is running a 2.4 kernel on these things. I'm not sure why they chose 2.4 over 2.6 especially since 2.6 has been out for over 3 years now. But, the Palm folks assure me that 2.6 is in the works.
The WR WorkBench development environment for the Foleo has been significantly hobbled. Priced at around $500 for the environment, it will only allow you to develop applications code. No drivers or kernel code. And, the development environment costs as much as the Foleo itself. I'm now sure how this strategy will play with the Linux development community, but I guess that Palm will find out soon enough.
The other piece of the mobile market that I saw addressed at LinuxWorld was the issue of power management. Linux has long been crippled with respect to power management because of trying to fit into a Micro$oft-centric ACPI model without being able to gain access to the secret sauce of ACPI internals. However, significant progress is being made at supporting very aggressive power management techniques in Linux.
We now have the "tickless" kernel. No more periodic clock ticks that wake the processor up from a nice nap just to announce that the clock has advanced and there is nothing to do. With the tickless operation, a interrupt is scheduled to go off in the future that then corresponds to an event like communicating to the cell tower. When that event occurs, all of the other counters are updated.
Another advancement that was discussed at the conference was the new PowerTOP system. This tool was announced by Arjan van de Ven from Intel and is targeted at finding the top power consumers in a running Linux system. This is an important step forward as it now allows Linux developers to find some of the really stupid things we were doing and eliminate them. For example, the Gnome window manager polls for events at 100 Hz. The GVim editor also polls for events as does dozens of other applications even though the window manager was already polling for those same events. All things considered, there are thousands of applications that are duplicating work and causing the CPU core to wake up when its not needed. PowerTOP allows us to find these offenders and rewrite key sections to avoid this behavior.
The results from the PowerTOP efforts are already starting to bear fruit. Many of the most common applications have been modified and upstreamed from the distributions. This means that distributions such as Ubuntu "Gutsy" will have these enhancements when it comes out in October. With these modified packages, we're already seeing more than .5 hours of increased battery life on the test laptops. Now, if we could just break the ACPI stranglehold...
OK, so that's enough for this set of ramblings. Stay tuned for more discussion on virtualization in the embedded space as well as a more detailed discussion on power management.
Happy hacking...
