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Sony opens up the Dynamic Android Sensor HAL (DASH)
Sony has announced that the Dynamic Android Sensor Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) is now open for collaboration on GitHub. Since DASH was opened up in February, there have already been contributions from the CyanogenMod team, and this move is meant to foster more of that. "As a next step, we are now making DASH available as an open source project on GitHub. Here, custom ROM developers can find the source code files and “make” files for the sensors in Xperia™ smartphones, which is used to enable and disable multiple sets of sensors for each device, including the accelerometer, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, magnetometer, gyroscope, and pressure sensor. We plan to keep adding more sensor code as we release new phones. Anyone in the Android open community is free to contribute their own sensor implementations and other improvements to the DASH code."
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Sony opens up the Dynamic Android Sensor HAL (DASH) Posted Aug 23, 2012 17:12 UTC (Thu) by sjj (subscriber, #2020) [Link]
I haven't bought anything Sony since their rootkit. This makes up for about 0.05% of my lost trust. Progress!
Sony opens up the Dynamic Android Sensor HAL (DASH) Posted Aug 24, 2012 0:36 UTC (Fri) by tonyblackwell (subscriber, #43641) [Link]
Seconded on both points
Sony opens up the Dynamic Android Sensor HAL (DASH) Posted Aug 24, 2012 0:42 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] I think the bigger issue is trying to understand just how Sony thinks it can thrive, or even exist, in an increasingly open world (in terms of both hardware and software). What I find really disgusting is how Sony first enabled, even encouraged end-users to boot Linux on the PS3, and then thoughtlessly yanked away that privilege. Sony is a big company, with many divisions/sub-organizations, each with their own agenda and goals. The department opening up DASH might not have anything related to the PS3 group that rudely revoked the openness of that platform, but they're all guilty by association. While I applaud Sony's actions regarding DASH, I, like you, am still skeptical of Sony's motives. At least the music CD rootkit (PDF) didn't target or affect Mac or Linux PC's. Not to mention that these rootkitted CD's violated the Red Book standard (ironically the standard that Sony helped define, way back in 1980!), but I digress...
Sony opens up the Dynamic Android Sensor HAL (DASH) Posted Aug 24, 2012 2:39 UTC (Fri) by SEJeff (subscriber, #51588) [Link]
Tough crowd!
Sony opens up the Dynamic Android Sensor HAL (DASH) Posted Aug 24, 2012 15:25 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> What I find really disgusting is how Sony first enabled, even encouraged end-users to boot Linux on the PS3, and then thoughtlessly yanked away that privilege.
This was to work around the stupid European tax codes on 'personal computers' versus 'gaming consoles'. Once the code changed then along with that so did Sony's support of Linux on the PS3.
This sucked, but it just is another reminder that closed gardens can't grow open source software.
Sony opens up the Dynamic Android Sensor HAL (DASH) Posted Aug 24, 2012 3:39 UTC (Fri) by tnoo (subscriber, #20427) [Link]
> I haven't bought anything Sony since their rootkit. This makes up for
> about 0.05% of my lost trust. Progress!
Exactly the same here.
These are Ericsson people Posted Aug 24, 2012 8:10 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
This is not Sony. This is Ericsson, which has always had a solid engineering culture inside the company. The mobile phone group just happened to be recently sold to Sony.
But make no mistakes. These guys are not Sony in any more than name. My personal guess however, is that they won't survive long with their now overlords as they recently started layoffs and reorganizing.
These are Ericsson people Posted Aug 24, 2012 9:20 UTC (Fri) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]
The phone division has been more and more keen on open the further they moved away from Ericsson. The announcement around ASOPing Sony phones is a post-buyout move, and the decision to provide newer versions of Android for their 2011 phones was made after the buyout was mooted.
If anything, the evidence suggests Ericsson gave the mobiles the classic telco "fuck you, customer" culture that saw the 2010 Xperias launch with an outdated version of Android, grudgingly upgrade to 2.1, and refuse to provide anything beyond that.
Sony opens up the Dynamic Android Sensor HAL (DASH) Posted Aug 24, 2012 8:45 UTC (Fri) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link]
I know it's the Android way, but I'm very uncomfortable with those "HALs". It's the kernel job to provide those abstractions !
Yet another HAL outside the kernel Posted Aug 24, 2012 9:30 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
"There's nothing in computing that can't be broken by another level of indirection."
Rob Pike
Userspace abstraction precedent Posted Aug 24, 2012 9:56 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
There are precedents on the non-Android Linux desktop
A PCI sound chipset, a USB headset, and a Bluetooth headset are very different from the perspective of the Linux kernel. The kernel is content to mediate both the USB and PCI solutions through a common userspace API (ALSA pcm) but Bluetooth data is just data until it hits userspace.
So the only way to have these three sound making devices behave interchangeably as far as, say, talking to your friend over VoIP, is either for every program to have separate handling for the different cases, or for a userspace abstraction to intermediate. That's one of the things the once widely despised PulseAudio does for you.
Or consider webcams. Kernel policy forbids format conversions and the like inside the kernel, and in recent years that policy has been increasingly enforced. Once upon a time cameras with custom encodings or weird format decisions would hide some conversion code in their kernel driver. No more. Today if you want cameras to work properly you use a userspace library which masks the various differences between cameras and offers to deliver plain RGB data (or various other useful formats) regardless of what the native camera hardware is.
The kernel is irreplaceable when it comes to access control, resource management, and so on. But when it comes to adding a "take a picture for your avatar" feature to a program, I want a userspace abstraction that can capture the picture just as well from a $5000 pro HD video camera as from the $5 USB webcam I, the developer, happen to own, without me needing to buy dozens of cameras to check they work.
Userspace abstraction precedent Posted Aug 26, 2012 12:26 UTC (Sun) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
Expanding that a bit: since USB is a packet-based protocol, many USB drivers bring network programs into mind: you construct a packet of certain length, then tell the kernel driver to send it over the wire, then listen for response... The actual protocol is just binary data to kernel who only cares about the fact that the packets move in and out of the hardware.
The "do everything in kernel and then provide a file-based API to the programs" is merely ancient unix mentality. It is almost definitely not the best possible method to write every driver with.
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