Thread: Time for an open maemo fork?
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wmarone is offline wmarone
2011-03-10 , 04:31
Posts: 1,746 | Thanked: 2,100 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#42
Originally Posted by Funklord View Post
String parsing interfaces are a big no-no on most embedded platforms since they waste memory and time
These platforms that we call smartphones are far from what is considered "embedded" these days. To reach the blurring point between "embedded" and "phone" from the industrial perspective you either step through the looking glass into the realm of the baseband (where vxworks or some other RTOS rules the day,) or drop down under 16MB of RAM into the dumbphone world where they are trying to wring every last cent out of the system.

At the level we're working at, and with the hardware in these platforms, string parsing is totally trivial and you're better off working on minimizing wake-ups and overall power saving.

and how is it better than just using a shell interface?
dbus is common across Linux platforms, and has its own maintenance team. I'm not quite sure what you mean by a "shell interface" though.

Originally Posted by Funklord View Post
It may be fine for n900 and similar platforms with huge amounts of memory, (once we get rid of MMC and maybe have all that 32G as pure, directly accessible nand chips)
It's unlikely you'll ever see raw NAND in that quantity. The eMMC interface simplifies system bring up so much it's ridiculous.

I believe the largest part of the phone market needs a root system measured in a few M not G.
Certainly, however that also limits the tasks those phones are capable of. So as a result you have phones on the low-end (dumbphones) with a couple megs of space for the OS, and on the high end you have several hundred or more.

Look at openWRT project, it's easy to configure, comes out tiny, and they developed it out of a need for a better router distro. Now every mfg and their mom is using it in at least a few of the higher end routers since it saves them money and users get a better product.
openWRT is awesome, but with only 8MB of storage in my WNDR3700 I can't do a whole. In fact, I only have 1MB free and there's more I'd like for it to do, which will probably involve me performing acrobatics (or contortions) to make it boot from an external 8GB USB stick.
 

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