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OLPC Inspires Open Source Projects

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hey-somebody-thought-of-the-children dept.

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."

3 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Re:27 clicks later by asr_br · · Score: 5, Informative

    Better download just the paper itself instead of the full proceedings.

    BTW, newsforge has a report about the presentation as well.

    --
    Ademar http://www.ademar.org/

  2. Sugar or Poison? by Calyth · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. One example: the OLPC Children's Dictionary by SabineCretella · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!!!