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Samsung's Linux-based Diskless Camcorder
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices has a story about the Samsung Miniket, a digital camcorder the size of a pack of cards that also works as a portable MP3 player, webcam, voice recorder, storage device, and more. The Miniket (annoying Flash and sound) will be available in February or March in the US, for $600-$700, with a rugged 'sports' model to follow. The device runs Linux, boots in under a second, and is the first of several products from Samsung that will run a new variation of Linux called 'ARM-no-MMU.' LinuxDevices also has a whitepaper about Samsung research that shows the new Linux variant to be faster than normal Linux."
MMU stands for memory management unit. It is a component used to protect parts of memory from being accidently overwritten, for example.
My guess that it uses some sort of flash memory, which is technicially not a 'disk'.
My spoon is too big.
The Miniket boots from 128KB of NOR Flash, and includes 16MB of SDRAM. As noted above, various models offer different amounts of user file storage, which is based on a single internal NAND Flash chip. The 128KB NOR Flash is only used for bootloader functions; all other system software, including the kernel, is stored within the much larger NAND Flash.
I think diskless means no CD/DVD/floppy
Since it has no MMU. Without the overhead of actually having to manage the memory, it's got to be faster.
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camcorder the size of a pack of cards that also works as a portable MP3 player, webcam, voice recorder, storage device, and more
Now if only this thing was a phone, a GPS and a PDA with 802.11 and GPRS internet access. Then maybe I'd consider buying it.
I thought ARM-no-MMU was like handsfree, but without arms...
The 'white paper written by Samsung' mentioned in the submission is titled 'Context Switching and IPC Performance Comparison between uClinux and Linux on the ARM9 based Processor'. So it is indeed uClinux.
There's thousands of products which are "diskless devices" that don't require a server!! This is simply an embedded device - everything it needs is on flash memory.
This is not necessarily true. The difference in speed you'll get with a properly arranged MMU will be negligable. I hate SoC manufacturers who fall for this line of thinking and miss out the MMU "because it's not needed". It just makes development and debugging 10 times harder for a mostly negligable speed and power consumption gain.
Any SoC designers out there: please stop producing high spec CPUs without MMUs! You aren't doing anyone a favour.
What type of Flash memory is significantly faster than a hard drive?
The highest end Flash memory I see at Sandisk's site writes at 20MB/s. This is on the lower end of what 2.5" notebook hard drives are capable of and well below what a 3.5" drive could do.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Memory Stick! Bleh.
I wonder what made them make such a poor choice. The right choice would have been to go with Compact Flash or SD, if you want smaller.
Memory stick is still a Sony bound product (I know that now there are other manufacturers) and underperforms other cards, since there's no such fierce competition.
I see this as a big minus.
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If they've got the kernel to go faster, where's the source code? Don't they have to publish their diffs (under GPL), since they're distributing the new OS version with every camera?
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