Cinder Mobile OS Lets Users Send More Power To Slow Apps

alphadogg writes with this excerpt from Network World: "Stanford University researchers are designing an operating system from the ground up to handle the power and security requirements of mobile devices. The Cinder operating system is already working on an Arm chip, and members of the team are working on making it run on the HTC G1 handset, according to Philip Levis, a Stanford assistant professor. Levis spoke about Cinder at the Stanford Computer Forum on Tuesday. If an application isn't running as fast as the user wants, a Cinder-based phone could include a button to boost the energy allocated to that application, Levis said. Cinder also could allow users to download any code and run it safely on their phones in a 'sandbox' mode."

Comments

Warning:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you over-amp a sandboxed app too much, you end up with molten glass.

Re:Umm

[jonbryce]

Is it like the Turbo button you used to get on ancient desktop computers?

Geek Phone?

[Manip]

... So you know what people say about academics being out-of-touch? ...

This article is the perfect example of that. The fact that they think any real person will use or understand a "sandbox mode" is just laughable.

The power boost button is just offloading what the OS should be doing behind the scenes onto the user to rarely get used by most of its users.

Security is insanely easy to solve on a phone...
1) Build a Java VM for 3rd party Apps
2) Limit its API scope
3) Win.

Re:Umm

[sakdoctor]

Those who don't understand the TURBO BUTTON are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

Re:Umm

[causality]

include a button to boost the energy allocated to that application

I thought the chip gets the power, not the application. Am I reading this right?

The application is intangible, non-material information in the form of ones and zeroes. It's not possible to apply electrical power to it. Therefore, "more power to slow apps" or "boost the energy allocated to that application" should be understood as an expression meaning that there is more energy given to the chips/hardware that is running the application in question.

The article is very light on details, but I take it the idea is that more power would translate to higher clock frequencies or higher data throughput and the like. The article also fails to mention whether this mobile OS is capable of multitasking. If it is, then presumably the power settings for a given application would apply to the timeslices during which it is running.