OLPC ($100 "laptop") FAQ

[Jon maddog Hall]

>>   Today's laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is
>>   used to manage the other third, which mostly does the same
>>   functions nine different ways.

>I'm not sure it's less true of the typical Linux system than a Windows
>system.

I was in Boston yesterday for USENIX and I ran into Ron Minnick.  Ron has been
working on fast booting techniques, and was headed over to the OLPC project
but had never met Jim Gettys face to face so I introduced them.  Then I tagged
along to look at the project.

Ron (as normal) was soon immersed in boards that have lots of "green wires"
and was trying to get the OLPC to boot quickly.  He turned to me sadly and
said that the keyboard driver, whose job is to strobe the keyboard was
64 kilobytes.  Now in the days of gigabyte memories on laptops it took a
while for that to sink in, but then I realized that the code to strobe the
keyboard took as much memory as I had on my Osborne I, which ran CP/M and
useful applications like compilers, databases, etc.

Ron did admit that the keyboard driver did "some other things" other than just
"strobe the keyboard", but 64 KB is still a LOT of memory for something like
that.

When we were developing Digital Unix there came a time when we decided that
on one release we would concentrate on shrinking the system, which at that
time required 64 MBytes just to boot, and something like 1 GB for the disk
image (and remember that disks and memory were a bit more expensive and smaller
than today's).  The engineers got it to boot in 32 MBytes and considerably
smaller disk image, but it also ran seven per cent faster (mostly due to
keeping more of the data in CPU and memory cache.

md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.672.4557       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
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Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association

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