Somebody decided that it would be funny to design the Ubuntu Lucid (and newer) Arm version to run only on the Arm A8 with Thumb2 instruction set. The problem is that the N900, one of the only Arm A8 devices in general distribution, has a buggy Thumb2 implementation. This means that Ubuntu versions higher than Karmic are unstable and crash-prone on the N900.

There are two big ironies with this decision by Canonical.

First, the Thumb2 instruction set has only one purpose, to make the binaries smaller. It has no effect on speed. Yet, any device capable of running the binaries included with Ubuntu will have plenty of space in its rootfs, at least enough for a full Ubuntu system (if it doesn't it can easily use tricks to get around that limitation, like the N900 uses). So the Thumb2 instruction set is really useless on A8 devices.

The second big irony is that they insisted on the useless Thumb2 instruction set, but refused to use the VFP optimisations (things that would actually improve the speed of the apps, and actually supported on the N900) because they didn't want to limit themselves too much on their choice of devices. WTF?! Thumb2 isn't limiting your choice of devices, but VFP optimisations somehow is limiting?!

Argh!

Why is iOS not on there? I thought it ran on EVERYTHING from high end sports-cars down to bluetooth toasters?

The annoying lagginess appears to be a slow memory leak, judging by the way it's disappeared for me after a reboot.

I'm sampling memory use every few days to see what it is.

It's annoying and not really good enough, on the other hand you can't say that the available flavour of Android is any better (with regard to this or other bugginess) until you've run that for a similar amount of time.

If you're after full Google-everything, Google Android is clearly the way to go. They have a very close, Google-supported relationship.

Maemo/Meego isn't targeted at that, and I suspect many of us chose Maemo precisely becuase we wanted to *avoid* too much Google integration. Optional Googly apps on Maemo/Meego would be nice for those who want them, but Google might not support that: It's probably in Google's commercial interests to keep the Maemo/Meego Google experience less good, less well integrated.

Wow - Thumb2 isn't complicated, it's mostly just an instruction reformatter. How hard can it be to screw that up?

Smaller binaries improve speed in many ways. First, because they decrease the i-cache footprint. Second, because they decrease total RAM usage or decrease swapping, or increase the effective page cache available for other things, depending on your point of view. Third, fewer page faults on startup (and when running if paging); fourthly, less to read from storage.

Still, I agree with you that making Lucid need a non-buggy A8 at this time is daft, with so many other ARM flavours still around.

How hard would it be to recompile the whole of Lucid with VFP and N900 Thumb2 workarounds (assuming they exists)?

I'll say it again:

I'll switch to MeeGo, but at first it will be dual-boot Maemo 5 and MeeGo. And I hope MeeGo will be more flexible about desktop environments and allow uninstalling of default apps (like MicroB). Something less complex, less layered would be welcome.

Why the poll closed so fast? I haven't vote yet.... anyway..i will vote "I'd switch to MeeGo 1.1 ". LOL!

http://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/AR...TA_430973.html is probably a kernel option you'd like to look at. But do note the following quote:

"The workaround enables the BTB/BTAC operations by setting ACTLR.IBE and also flushes the branch target cache at every context switch."

Flushing branch target cache sounds .. slow. It might get things to work, but it sure as hell won't perform.

after seeing how fast the browser was on that N900 android video I would love to try that soon. I will probably use all 3 and pick the one or two I like the most and use them for daily use. I got this phone to play with and hack so it only makes sense