Slashdot Mirror
OLPC Inspires Open Source Projects
Don Marti writes "A loose network of developers representing many commonly used open source projects are working to develop a new generation of low-memory, efficient code. This targeted code is being designed for a system, of which only 500 prototype boards now exist:
the 'Children's Machine 1' from the One Laptop Per Child project." From the article: "Gettys says measuring existing performance has to come before trying those changes. 'We've been pulling in every decent performance tool Linux has so we can optimize when and where it really matters,' he says. A key automated testing tool is Tinderbox, a build and test management tool originally developed for Mozilla, that new OLPC developer Chris Ball has installed, to build and test OLPC software. And, after Red Hat kernel developer Dave Jones gave a standing-room-only talk at the 2006 Linux Symposium titled, Why Userspace Sucks (Or, 101 Really Dumb Things Your App Shouldn't Do), his reports of suckiness, which include kernel-based measurements of wasteful behavior, are helpful, Blizzard says."
Finally, an antidote for sloppy bloated code - exploit child labor in 3rd world countries to test your product. Its elitist, I tell ya!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
No Java then, I take it?
So you dont have to dig...
_ procv1.pdf
"Why user space sucks" is at:
Pages 441-449 of http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2006/linuxsymposium
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
his reports of suckiness, which include kernel-based measurements of wasteful behavior, are helpful, Blizzard says.
Now, I can't find any mention of a Blizzard in either the linked article or the summary, so exactly who is this quote attributed to?
I swear, it's about time people got away from the "aww, we got as much memory as we need! No need to worry if this is way to big for our needs!
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
Just C and dietlibc.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I do hope that the one laptop per child project will succeed in setting benchmarks for what a laptop should be and also how the applications which run on that laptop should behave (efficiently using memory being one of them).
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
Towards the end of the article they imply the final keyboard will not have the caps lock key. WHICH MAY SOUND LIKE A GOOD THING. But then remember these laptops are for kids, and who knows if in the future they will be faced with KEYBOARDS THAT HAVE CAPS LOCK. And that may be confusing for a couple of hours until they get used to it and learn to live with it. LIKE WE HAVE.
I know that this theme has been beaten to death but I want to keep it fresh in people's minds, perhaps if we ask enough we'll finally get these. I want to be able to buy myself one or more! They could sell them for $200 and put the profits into the program. Save the children, buy a OLPC! It would also be nice if independent schools here in the US that are willing to employ some alternative education resources (like open source textbooks) could buy them.
Consider this a "bump" in the collective unconscious :) of slashdot.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
AFAIK, the userspace app framework for OLPC is Sugar, which is Python based.
On what is basically an embedded computing platform with 128MB RAM, ~500MB permanent storage, and a CPU that doesn't have a L2 cache (last I checked), how much of these performance tuning would actually matter if all of these userspace apps depends on a language with an interpreter that you couldn't even fit 1/10 into the 16K of L1 instruction cache?
Don't get me wrong, me and my fellow students at the university are working on performance tuning, but as I look in to the Geode chip more and more, I believe that Sugar is poison for OLPC.
If you want a smaller footprint, hire someone with smaller feet!
I for one welcome our new prepubescent, code-writing overlords.
This is another sign of bubblepack (as in a bubblepack on the shelves at wallmart/target) computing.
In hardware, bubblepack computing is focused on using present technology to create dirt cheap, very low power consumption platforms.
In software, bubblepack computing implements small and elegant code in modern software enviroments.
The software impact extends to use on older machines which run linux, and USB key distros.
Or, if you use C++, you might like uSTL.
Well, yes, OLPC inspires Open Content as well. We are already working on a dictionary for Children on WiktionaryZ, the OLPC Children's Dictionary. What you can do for us? You can contribute to the translations of the defined meanings - just ten words + definition to translate in any of the many languages of the worls. No... it's not a joke ... we need your help and if you cannot help us, please tell other people. Thank you!!!
Why do they emphazise so much, that this laptop is for kids? The machine will be able to read books, communicate, and record writing, and these features are also useful for grown-ups. Also, it will be targetted towards education, but there is no need to wait a generation to have more knowledgeable people? I mean, if a adult farmer can learn about solar power now, then that leads to more solar power in general.
There are some reasons to have mostly kids use the laptops; 1) limited supply/access, if a town only has one or two of these laptops, the "ROI" may be greater if the kids use it, because they have longer left to live! If the programs name, "OLPC", has any root in the realistic expectations, then there will be plenty of time during a 24h day for everyone.
2) The adults may not have the basic language- or computer skills required to operate the laptop.
I think the project is a great idea, and I agree that one needs to focus on a specific matter, otherwise it will just become a lot of nice words.
Forth is relatively quick (slower than C but probably faster than Java), but insanely compact. I would bet most forth code compiles to less than 10% the size of similar projects in C.
Forth has a bit of a stigma, though, which I've always thought was odd. Forth ought to be a favorite of many slashdotters, with it's efficiency and hackability.
There also appears to be a summary at newsforge. A discussion on someone's mailing list. Mentioned in the LKML.
is the cheetah as it stalks the devalope, waiting until just the right moment, then the chase is on.
"And, after Red Hat kernel developer Dave Jones gave a standing-room-only talk at the 2006 Linux Symposium titled, Why Userspace Sucks (Or, 101 Really Dumb Things Your App Shouldn't Do), his reports of suckiness, which include kernel-based measurements of wasteful behavior, are helpful, Blizzard says."
dear god, the run on nature, of this sentence, really makes me want to kill myself, either with a rusty spoon, or with a thousand paper cuts, though I currently can't decide, while I am leaning towards the paper cuts as they might be, somehow, symbolically related to a suicide caused by, among other things, grammar.
Like OS/2? The first Xbox? BeOS? As I asked once before (so I'm not re-writing the whole post), is this a platform without applications?
Those platforms were great technology, but users need apps not platforms or great technology. And yes, I know about all the Linux apps, but look at its market share.
I hope someone will cheer me up and explain why this is not an issue with OLPC.
>>Even simple programs use up way more memory than needed.
Agreed. It's obscene to write a simple "Hello, world" and look at the memory usage. I used to fret about a few dozen bytes... now I allocate megs and don't even thing about it. Such is progress. Some people (such as Steve Gibson at GRC.com) are still coding Windows apps in assembly. I know people here aren't too impressed with Gibson (for all his showboating) but I've gotta say it's damned impressive seeing a real honest full-featured Windows app that's smaller than the Slashdot.gif picture in the upper left corner of this page. That's just cool.
Also, look at the Demo world. There are some absolutely stunning apps being written that use procedural rendering to accomplish stunning skeletal character animation with inverse kinematics, with soundtracks and advanced effects, in just a few hundred K bytes. Amazing stuff.
So coding for efficiency is happening, but it's rare -- a case of someone showing off. Or is it?
This brings up an interesting point: due to changes in architecture and hardware, coding for efficiency (usually performance) is already resulting in smaller code size. Let me explain.
In the early days of microcomputers (C64, Apple ][, TRS80), where system resources were extremely limited and cpu power was slight (e.g. 6502/8088, 8bit, 1mhz, 32k RAM, 40k floppies, no HDD or only tape for storage) and programmers had no choice but to code for efficient 1) performance within the boundaries of storage limitations.
Then around the days of the M68000 Macintosh and the 386, with its extended memory addressing, coding for performance meant pre-computing tables and looking up values as needed. Memory was cheaper than CPU.
This trend reversed in the early 90s when storage became cheap and bus speed increased, but couldn't keep pace with CPU speed advances. Suddenly, it was "cheaper" to compute values at the time they were needed b/c bus speeds imposed a huge penalty on looking up values. Breaking the on-chip ram cache could make-or-break a tight graphics rendering loop, so that was priority. (remember, at this point, software rendering was still common).
Introduce the extremely high-power GPU video cards we have today and the situation changes again. Offloading huge computational loads onto a deidcated graphics engine, the system CPU is somewhat of a traffic cop, ensuring subsystems have a steady flow of sound, textures, geometry, and network packets, oh... and occasionally performing game logic.
So it appears we've come full circle.
The bad news is now you guys have to listen to dinosaurs like me who cut their teeth coding in 6502 assembly ramble on about "well, sonny, back in MY day..."
After recovering my composure from reading the astonishing statement that a 100MB kernel would be considered small rather than ten-to-fifty times too big, I ran into this:
The kernel halfway wakes itself up 20 times a second to see if you've plugged something into your nonexistent PS/2 port.
They poll I/O ports?! Have these people never heard of hardware interrupts? I knew that a lot of lore had been lost in the PC revolution, but I had no idea the situation was this bad.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
If your project is "for the children", then any time you do anything anyone dislikes, you can deflect the criticism by claiming they hate the poor little children.
Person with common sense: "Why are you pushing a dependance on undocumented, unmaintainable hardware from user-hostile corporations on these people when you claim to be open?"
One Laptop Per Customer: "Why do you hate the children?"
Person with common sense: "Why are you trying to sell starving people laptops? Maybe selling them wells so they have clean water would be better?"
One Laptop Per Customer: "Why do you hate the childen?"
If you speed up a computer's boot time by one second. And every PC in the world (aprox a billion) starts up every day. You would save ~12000 human years every year. Every year you would save ~150 lifes!
Every millisecond speed increase a day of software everybody uses every day would save 12 lives!
NOW GO BACK TO WORK! You murderer!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
i had a 486-33 with 8mb RAM in college. python was one of the few usable languages.
There are quite a few open source apps that are full of code that no one ever runs at all but it rarely gets yanked out because no one is certain that the code isn't used.
I would like to see a library that can be linked in like the profiler libraries that will record what functions get called in such a way that the data can be shared with others in a massively distributed profiling system so the data can get back to the developers so they can look at the data say "we have 3 million people using this code and not one of them ever used this feature...time to purge it"
I'm sure I'm in the minority here on slashdot, but I'd rather have the engineers/coders developing the software that I use to spend their time making the software correct (solving the correct problem, getting the correct answer, reliably handling failure cases, good error messages, solid documentation) than "efficient" (i.e. 5-10% speed gain for gentoo ricers or whatever). Sure software's no good if it won't run on your machine, but it's also no good if it gives you the wrong answers or breaks at a critical time for one of your clients.
That being said, OLPC will probably give a lot of geeks the excuse to spend their time optimizing (which is fun) vs all those other things (which are not).
So, this isn't a post to start a religious war or anything, I worked with Ken Estes(author of tinderbox) at mail.com while he was writing and used it at another organization with him.. and it does it's job ok.
However, when I came to work at my latest company I went with Flamebox.. 3 reasons.
1. Cleaner code(Ken's brilliant but...)
2. Easy Task Definition and grouping.
3. Ability to define different types of warnings and errors using an extensible set of regular expressions.
Check it out.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/flamebox/
--iamnotayam
How quickly /. forgets, sigh.
Without open documentation for the hardware the OLPC is not a truly open source platform.
From a "help the chiiildren" point of view that's ok, except OLPC are trying to bullshit the FOSS community into doing their development for them by claiming the have an open platform.
Not quite a laptop, but indeed a low-power, Geode-based, small, Web-oriented product, the Linutop seems like a nice platform. Heck, they even mention that it's based on Free Software and that they invite Free Software developers to invent new usages for the platform. I'll take one of those over Negroponte's crankshaft toy any day!
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
I'm reminded of theprodukkt, a coding group that released a first-person shooter that takes up about 96 kilobytes. If this is possible, it's amazing that comparable games tend to take up gigabytes.
Revive the Constitution.
Get a used $169 Fujistu Stylistic 3400 (P3 400, 192 MB RAM, 6 GB HDD) or a $299 3500 (P3 500, 256 Mb RAM, 15 GB HDD) tablet computer. Either way, it comes with Windows 2000, or you can install Linux. The 6 GB HDD is plenty big enough for a copy of the Knoppix image, plus some storage space.
If you must have a full install of every windows, mac, and linux app known to man, then Travelstar hard disks will work as upgrades to at least 40 gigs.
Add in (2) extra batteries and an external charger for $24 (I've got 2 of these kits on order) and a universal DC/DC adapter for $12.98 (that runs off of 8-14V) and you have a reasonable setup.
The tablet is not quite indestructible, but it's close.
Q: I NEED A SERVER SIZED CASE FULL OF STUFF!!! This thingy doesn't even have a keyboard.
A: Try installing a USB hub. I'm working on a simple 5V regulator to run a USB hub off of the 11V-14V input that can charge the laptop or it's external dual battery charger. I use a wireless USB keyboard & mouse combination, a USB camera, a USB dvd burner (that runs off USB power alone), a card reader, keychain drive, an external hard disk, a printer, a scanjet that auto-feeds 50 pages per minute, etc.
Q: I need a card reader or wi-fi card as I'm walking through the woods!
A: Try a CardBus solution, they don't stick out so far.
Q: I need networking...like in 3rd world countries!
A: USB wi-fi dongles are cheap, as are PCMCIA / CardBus cards. A dual 802.11s CardBus card or USB dongle would allow millions of people with their own hardware to network without having to beg MIT for a grant (never mind.)
Q: I lost my pen!
A: Use your fingernail.
Frankly, the Stylistic 3400/3500 is the perfect survivalist's / 3rd world / teacher's computer. I was with my dad in the ICU yesterday, and I was reading a WROX press book in Acrobat while I held his hand. I typed up a few syllabi and graded a few dozen student projects.
Andy Out!