| |||||||||||||
ELC: Android and the communityELC: Android and the communityPosted Apr 15, 2010 8:12 UTC (Thu) by morganr (subscriber, #43385)In reply to: ELC: Android and the community by juriise Parent article: ELC: Android and the community
Well I imagine the engineers at apple compile a linux kernel for their ARM-based system-on-chip that allows them access to all of its in-built devices. Starting with a known-good kernel/toolchain when debugging the hardware is a good idea! In the future they may well be able to use the iPhone OS to do this, if the HW stays close enough to previous versions.
(Log in to post comments)
ELC: Android and the community Posted Apr 15, 2010 12:02 UTC (Thu) by mcon147 (guest, #56569) [Link]
what does it mean specifically to "bring up their phones" ?
From those words it sounded like booting
ELC: Android and the community Posted Apr 15, 2010 12:34 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
It means initial bringup, when the new hardware arrives and you're not sure what works and what doesn't. You sit a hardware engineer down with a kernel hacker and they try to work out who's fault it is that things are broken. Hours of fun...
ELC: Android and the community Posted Apr 15, 2010 12:48 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
When you've designed a complicated piece of consumer electronics you send off for the first boards to be made, and at that point what you have is a non-functional object.
You know it should be able to display an animating clock, play a movie, read SD cards, etc. but it just sits there.
The process of getting it so that it'll do something is "bringing it up". This is where you find out any hardware problems that weren't in the simulation. If you're very good or very lucky there won't be too many, but there will be a few. Your objective is to check that all the intended features are there, and any problems can be worked around, or else you re-design and go around the loop again. A command line app that can detect the touch sensor raw output proves that's wired up correctly for example, no need to wait for the whizzy UI that'll use it.
Usually the software that's eventually supposed to run on this device does not yet exist. Probably the schedule says it will be available "next week" but it said that last month too. Even when it does exist, it is untested, and the combination of untested hardware and untested software is a recipe for frustration. So using Linux for "bring up" even when you intend to develop something in-house for the finished consumer product could make sense.
ELC: Android and the community Posted Apr 15, 2010 18:28 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
This is a very interesting discussion, particularly in light of the WePad demo debacle.
ELC: Android and the community Posted Apr 17, 2010 18:30 UTC (Sat) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]
> the WePad demo debacle.
Link?
|
|||||||||||||