LWN: Comments on "Interview: Wind River's John Bruggeman"

Interview: Wind River's John Bruggeman

chema — 2008-07-25T11:51:25+00:00

European "mirror" of the DO-178B is called ED-12B. It is just a copy, since the DO-178B was
developed by both RTCA and EUROCAE.
DO-178B "name" is widely used in EU. We used to name DO-178B instead ED-12B all the time :)

DO-178B is not only a certification, it is a process that starts the same day as the
development project itself. It will be very hard for an existing application get certified for
any DO-178B level and of course, definitively almost imposible to get Level A certification.

Is Openmoko free software? Ti Calypso GSM chipset

davi — 2008-07-25T08:25:27+00:00

It seems Openmoko has been forced to sign a _super_ NDA to be able to use the Ti Calypso GSM
chipset.   

You can read it at http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2007-Januar...


I do not know yet about the Wifi, GPS an other Openmoko devices.

Is Openmoko free software?

lolando — 2008-07-25T07:12:04+00:00

As far as I know, that was only true for the Neo 1973, and has been fixed for the Freerunner.
I'm no expert however, please consult the nice wiki.

Is Openmoko free software?

davi — 2008-07-24T19:07:06+00:00

I have been told the GSM driver uses a non-free software BLOB, and maybe too the Bluetooth,
Wifi, GPS and GPU chips.

Do you know if that is real?

What do you think about the openmoko?

lolando — 2008-07-24T09:52:25+00:00

The hardware is very attractive: GSM/GPRS, GPS, Bluetooth, Wifi, USB (both ways),
accelerometers, excellent screen resolution, a CPU powerful enough, all that in a phone-sized
device. Yummy.

The software part is not ready for the masses yet, and clearly announced as such. There are
at least three different software stacks (GTK-based Openmoko 2007.2, QT-based April/August
software update, and Freesmartphone.org framework-based); I think there's a fourth one
(Qtopia-based), and people speak of an hypothetical fifth ("stable hybrid release"). And some
have installed Debian on it, too. I have only tried the OM2007.2 one, which mostly works for
me as a phone+GPS (with a few manual tweaks). And the open hardware and software is really
lovely to work with: many things can be controlled through Dbus and/or Gconf, so you can write
small Python scripts to, for instance, import/export your phone contacts to VCF, or tune the
power saving mode, or whatever. This should be even more so with the generalised move to the
FSO stack.

I'm still quite impressed by the community though: there used to be a GPS problem, and the
wisdom went from "blargh, internal antenna connector isn't soldered properly, you'll have to
fix that yourself" to "hey, it works better when there's no SD card" to "okay, fix committed
in kernel, don't bother soldering anything" in about a week. One opkg update && opkg upgrade
later, everyone was happily recording GPS tracks for Openstreetmap :-)

All in all, I'm quite pleased with it. It is, to me, the (current) ultimate toy for smug
geeks: rare, versatile, hackable, and (for the smug part) restricted to those elitist bastards
who can handle a command-line for upgrades.

What do you think about the openmoko?

Miladinoski — 2008-07-24T09:30:38+00:00

Sorry that this might be off-topic, but I want to hear your opinion on OpenMoko's mobile
phone, because I am willing to buy it. Is it worth it? What could be improved? 

Please reply

Miladin

Interview: Wind River's John Bruggeman

Oddscurity — 2008-07-22T09:06:55+00:00

More than likely they'll implement a closed source player on top of the open bits, but as you
say it would be a good opportunity for open formats.

It's not at all unthinkable to have x264 video on those devices, decoding of which can be
offloaded to various media extensions some of these embedded platforms have.

Interview: Wind River's John Bruggeman

lolando — 2008-07-22T09:06:39+00:00

As a recent owner of a Freerunner telephone (well, more like a "device" actually), I would
have been interested in hearing this guy's point of view on Openmoko and Freesmartphone (.org)
stuff.  The way it is, I'm left wondering whether he just doesn't have anything to say or
whether he's deliberately ignoring it as irrelevant or as in "first they ignore you".

Interview: Wind River's John Bruggeman

appie — 2008-07-22T07:46:49+00:00

The interview lightly touches upon a thought that crossed my mind: with more people watching
Internet video and live feeds on their phones and Linux gaining ground in the mobile market
space, who knows, we finally might end up with widely used high quality open spec/source audio
& video formats.
Then again, that might just be me, over optimistic, wishful thinking :)

Interview: Wind River's John Bruggeman

aleXXX — 2008-07-22T07:04:23+00:00

Software for airborne systems must be DO178B certified in the US, in 
Europe there's a similar standard, can't remember the abbrev. right now. 
There are different levels for that, depending on the criticality of the 
software. E.g. the inflight entertainment system requires a less strict 
level of certification than the fly-by-wire software, since this can kill 
people.

For the highest criticality levels you need things like testing with 100% 
code coverage, you need to track all requirements and you have to be able 
to document in which lines of code each requirement is implemented, you 
must not have code where you don't have a requirement for it, each line 
of code must be "signed" by at least two developers, etc.

I think the Linux kernel is just too big and moving too fast to do this. 
Or, as somebody else already said, if you snapshot a kernel, strip out 
unneeded drivers, then start the testing, documenting etc., you are 
probably not better off than with another solution (months or years 
behind Linus tree, patches don't apply, behaviour is different because 
you changed so much, etc.).

So for these systems really a small OS (in LOC) is a good choice, it is 
just easier to certifiy (there are also free RTOS). RTOS in general are 
not necessarily something very sophisticated or complex, often they are 
actually quite simple and stripped down compared to a general purpose OS. 
But this makes them easier predictable and also certifiable.

Alex

Interview: Wind River's John Bruggeman

jordanb — 2008-07-22T05:39:09+00:00

I suspect it's more a matter of the process to get the software certified being complex,
rather than the standards themselves. 

For real high-integrity software, I think it would be very difficult to get Linux certified. A
big part of it is a verification of the development process, and you'd have an incredibly hard
time showing that Linux went through any sort of rigor (mainly because it didn't ;p). You
would probably have to take a snapshot of the kernel, rip out everything that isn't needed,
and then do code review and testing in-house, replacing or removing things that fail review or
don't conform to MISRA-C. By the time that's done whatever benefit there was to using Linux
over an in-house OS would likely be gone. 

Does the process serve to inflate the profits of a company like Wind River? Probably, but then
again, Aerospace has a culture of safety that doesn't exist in most other areas where software
is developed and used. The fact that Avionics have been remarkably free of people-killing bugs
is a pretty good validation of the process.

Interview: Wind River's John Bruggeman

Oddscurity — 2008-07-22T04:14:12+00:00

It depends on what you would call complex. Describing a triply redundant system appears to me
to be of the same complexity as say parallel programming. Designing a high availability data
driven website (Google, Slashdot, et al) may even compare to a degree, it's a different
domain, but the problem is largely the same. Those inter-bank payment systems and flight
booking systems probably come close, where data lossage is an absolute no-no.

It might just be he calls it "very, very complex" because those standards are hard to read for
all the legalese they're couched in.

In other words, I'm guessing as much as you are.

Interview: Wind River's John Bruggeman

smitty_one_each — 2008-07-22T02:54:16+00:00

>A great example of that would be security certification for an airplane. The standards and
the requirements to meet those certifications are very, very complex. 

Now, are these standards complex because the problem domain is complex, or are these standards
complex because that situation suits somebody's (not necessarily Wind River's) business model?