On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Jonas Petersson wrote:
> > I'd be curious to know how much of the code in one of these phones
> > really is Linux code.
>
> I guess that depends a lot on your definition of "Linux" - as you hint,
> you need a fair bit more than just a kernel for everything to work, so
> perhaps you are really after the rms "GNU/Linux" combo, right?
Well, I'd be curious as to how much of the code is "GNU/Linux" code,
then. I kinda doubt that they're using much more than the kernel and
libc, though; 'ls' is not to useful on a phone without a shell, and it
seems highly unlikely that they're using X11 to run the display.
> IMHO, there are a few things to gain from running a "GNU/Linux" context
> for development:
>
> * You can initially develop on boxes that use the same CPU (or perhaps a
> faster version), but have lots more memory etc (this is what the HH
> people do). Later you can trim it all down to the critical size.
Given that you're developing for very slow systems by today's standards,
you'd be far better off developing on an emulator run on a fast machine.
This offers the following advantages:
1. You don't have to develop any custom hardware beyond your phone.
2. You have more opportunity to automate the testing (starting up an
emulator is a lot easier than actually loading up code on a piece of
hardware).
3. Quite possibly your emulator runs faster than any available
hardware version of that CPU.
4. You have hugely expanded opportunities for debugging and testing
control.
> * The obvious one: If you find a problem, you can fix it instead of just
> working around it, since you have the FULL source (perhaps some people
> have that for Symbian etc too, but most people don't - in any case, the
> useless docs are no replacement for source).
This is very powerful, but are you really sure that a vendor spending
that much licencing an embedded OS is not getting source access?
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
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Received on Tue Nov 30 16:34:36 2004