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Dirk Hohndel gives Intel keynote at OSCON 2009

By David Stewart (Intel) (177 posts) on July 22, 2009 at 9:08 am

I just heard Dirk Hohndel give the OSCON 2009 Intel keynote for Imad Sousou. Dirk
is the chief open source technologist at Intel and this is the third year he has stepped in for Imad at the last minute at OSCON. Here are some notes I took from the Dirk's talk:

Intel has gone from being a skeptic to being a major contributor to open source.

To show how this works, take the Netbook. It started out originally as a Linux product. Now there are products available from Windows, Linux and newly announced ChromeOS. It's a hot category.

How are netbooks different and what Intel has done to enhance them:

• Fast - don't make the user wait. If it's longer than 15 seconds, it's taking too long. Fast boot is an early priority. We need to be done with booting as quickly as possible. "Done" means the CPU and disk are idle and ready to do work. Do slow things as early as possibe, initialize the DHCP services, probe HW that will take a long time. We have added an asynchronous scheduler
  for the kernel for I/O initialization. Disk tends to be slow, so bring up the disk as quickly as possible and start reading in the things which you need for bringing things up. So we need to bring up
  the user experience as soon as possible.
• Graphics presentation - things have not changed much in Linux graphics since the 80s. Kernel Mode Setting - don't want the screen to flip between graphics and text mode to get the X server to set the right mode. Instead, do it in the kernel. Graphics Execution Manager - kernel memory management in the kernel. Safety - X server can now run without running as the superuser, so now you can run things much safer.
  user interfaces - we acquired a company that provides for actors which behave with physics.
• Connected - there are a lot of things which need to be connected from wifi, blue tooth, wimax, etc. We started from scratch to create a place where everything can be plugged in and are easily extensible. Then, we are extending open source telephony by starting from scratch and created
  the ofono project with Nokia to achieve this.

Categories: Mobility, Open Source
Tags: Intel, linux, moblin, netbooks, Open Source

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Comments (1)

July 22, 2009 1:19 PM PDT miv89 Total Points: 5 Registered User

Nice. Fast booting is very good!!!

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• How John Chow Makes Over $40000 Per Month Blogging
  July 22, 2009 10:17 AM PDT
• Intel Software Network Blogs » Dirk Hohndel gives Intel keynote at … | Technology News Update
  July 22, 2009 7:56 PM PDT

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