Intel Software Network Blogs » David Stewart (Intel)

A Merlot, a Malbec and a Moblin

David Stewart (Intel) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:48:01 +0000

Last week, a few of us were talking about future Moblin OS releases, and we were just having fun and starting talking about our wish list for code name "themes". You know, this is when a series of products are given code names before their real names go on, and the code names follow a certain pattern.

For example, releases of Microsoft Windows used to be named for cities in the US (Memphis, Chicago) and then switched to ski areas (Whistler, Longhorn, Blackcomb).

So for example, you could name releases of a product after the grape varietals which are commonly made into wine. I'd be worried about this, since theoretically about a third of the world's population are non-drinkers and might be offended.

Some of my favorite code name series (some of which derived from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_names) ...

Google's Android OS releases are based on deserts, I have heard of Cupcake, Donut, Eclaire and Flan, according to this Wikipedia entry.
the Ubuntu OS has releases named after animals, like Jaunty Jackalope and Karmic Koala).
When I was at Sequent, our OS releases had no code names, just version numbers, but at least you knew what you were getting. But our major systems had some interesting names. For example, I remember one we referred to as "STiNG", which stood for "Sequent, The Next Generation (with intel inside)". I think we called our first 386 based server as "K9", to make people think we were using a different chip architecture.
Intel has been known to use code names for various projects, though we try to stamp them out when the product has an "official" name. (So now, Nehalem is just a river in Oregon). Not surprisingly, we have various themes that pop up here and there.
Mac OS releases are named after big cats, I think. What happens when they run out of cat names?

Any other favorite code name theme memes?

Surviving Hell Week

David Stewart (Intel) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:44:56 +0000

Last week, most of my friends didn't hear much from me, both online and in reality. That's because I had one of those fun times when the big bosses come in and ask the team to deliver something special very quickly, above and beyond our usual commitments. These are pretty normal in our line of work, but I was shocked by how gobsmacked I got by it.

The actual task is probably not that important. Suffice it to say that we had people all over the world contributing pieces all week, and at the end we had a small group locked into a conference room for a day to make the final push and get things done on time.

But of course, some things went wrong. A software build process that had worked flawlessly for months decided to break and it was defying our efforts to fix it. Hardware we expected to use had different specs than we had anticipated. Some major surgery had to be done on hardware and software, all unplanned of course.

On that special day, I remember looking around our "dungeon" at our team and saying, "Well friends, I'm delighted to have had lunch with you today. I really hope I don't have to have dinner with you too." And fortunately, we did get done with our task by 6:30PM (even though we had thought to be done by 2:00PM). And the good news, of course, is that we met our milestone and got stuff delivered on time.

Anybody in the high tech industry will recognize this kind of sprint to get something special accomplished. When I'm done, I'm usually exhausted but happy, delighted in the team that came together and made it happen. I am extraordinarily proud of the team that pulled this off!

But I was surprised at the toll this took on me personally. For some reason this time, I felt really wiped out every evening during this week-long sprint. By the weekend, I didn't feel like doing much of anything but be with my family and be a vegetable.

Why was this such a drainer on me?

I wasn't able to take care of my body very well. Most days I do certain things to keep myself healthy in the physical, nutritional and spiritual areas, but I was recovering from an injury last week. As a result, I couldn't get in my daily run, which meant I had less energy than usual.
Rather than my normal eating habits, I was snacking on things like cookies and taking in more calories than usual. This was also causing me to feel really wiped out.
Of course, I didn't allow myself enough time to sleep, so I was taking in more than the usual quantity of really good quality caffiene. Although coffee can give a nice temporary boost, I find myself less energetic long term. The big problem is probably lack of hydration. By the end of the day, the lack of drinking proper amount of fluids takes a major toll on me.

So the lesson is obvious - take care of yourself when you are sprinting! Don't just assume you can get it done just on having the guts and the goods. There may not be time for all of the things you are accustomed to doing to take care of yourself, so allow time for recharging for the next sprint.

Cloudy with a chance of Moblin

David Stewart (Intel) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:12:21 +0000

I noticed today in this blog post a reference to Moblin being a cloud-based OS. Primarily this is because Moblin 2.0 has services such as twitter, last.fm integrated into the OS, and these web services are considered "cloud computing" services.

I guess if I were taking a more formalistic viewpoint, I might observe that social media services are available as first class entities in the OS, on a par with applications, panels, etc. This is a powerful basis of a metaphor for collaboration and innovation, since Moblin is an open source project and makes it straightforward to innovate new features and value.

And innovation around people's data is an essential quality of web 2.0. The best early example of this is the Google Maps web service. When people discovered that they could reverse-engineer the AJAX interface and integrate new applications with Maps data, suddenly Google Maps was mashed up with all kinds of new applications and ideas.

For Moblin, there is no reverse engineering required - it's an open source project, so it's it should be clear how to add more services or find new ways to integrate them into the OS.

How does Cloud Computing intersect with Moblin? It's actually something I have not considered much before, and I need to think about it more.

Moblin - the Web2.0 OS - and on getting heckled

David Stewart (Intel) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:01:30 +0000

I gave a chalk talk yesterday on Moblin at OSCON 2009, the Open Source Convention in San Jose. This was a no slides white-board chat about what's cool in Moblin, where is the future going, and what are the ways people can collaborate and participate.

I touched on some of the high points of what makes Moblin great as an OS design *for* netbooks, rather than adapted to them as an afterthought. I had one heckler yell at me from a neighboring booth (more on this later) and shared my little epiphany about Web 2.0 and Moblin.

< b>Fast boot - Moblin in its current form has a goal to boot in 8 seconds from when the BIOS finishes its work to the moment the CPU and Disk are truly idle and able to do useful work. I talked about some of the really hard work and some tricks we use to achieve this.
Fast shutdown - I commented on how quick Moblin is to shut down, just hit the power switch and it's off within a few seconds. I mentioned that when you want to turn off your cell phone, TV, whatever, you hit the power switch, and it's the same with netbooks on Moblin.
User Experience - I refered to the great work that the guys at Opened Hand have done to make an amazing user experience.
Web 2.0 - it's built in, in fact it's a fundamental part of the OS experience.

The heckling came when I mentioned fast shutdown. You see Moblin doesn't have a shutdown "button" or anything in the OS. We just use the power button from the netbook itself. I began kidding around and saying, "I remember one particular OS, which will remain nameless, in which you had to hit the 'Start' button to 'Stop' the computer."

From the next booth, I hear a call, "Hey! We're listening here!". Yes, the booth next door was the Microsoft booth. Hey, I didn't mention the OS, did I? Guess they're just sensitive.

But the epiphany I shared on Web 2.0 was three or four years ago when I sent an email to one of my teen-age daughters, and then asked her a few days later if she had seen it.

"No, Dad; I don't look at my email every day!"

What? How can this be? A technologically plugged-in student who isn't addicted to mail? But then I realized that for the generation after mine that email is really dead as a communication tool. Blogs and IM have taken its place.

Fast forward to today, and blogs are just about dead too - Twitter, Flickr and Facebook have taken their place of prominence because of their immediacy.

And Moblin 2.0 is designed with social media as a core and foundational part of the experience of the OS. It's been years since browsing alone was the core of the operating system. I'm amused to see that even today, there are OS's announced which a little more than a browser on a simple OS, and this creates all kinds of excitement. In fact, having social media integrated at a fundamental level is what makes me so excited about Moblin.

You show me mine, I'll expo you yours, OSCON

David Stewart (Intel) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:50:25 +0000

Why do I love the show floor at conferences? It's almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation with the poor folks doing booth duty. Often this is because they might not be working in the area that you are interested in, or the noise level is just too high to have a good talk.

Sadly, I am addicted to technology, and the show floor is a great place for a quick fix.

OSCON is the Open Source Convention put on by O'Reilly Media and is being held in the San Jose Convention Center. As with any good-sized convention, the big hitters in the technology business are present...

Microsoft - OK, these guys seem unusual to be present in an open source setting, but they want to highlight the tools they have created for hosting open source projects. Their booth seems mostly an excuse for people to play Guitar Hero.
Sun - as the company which has contributed the most lines of open source code, it's not surprising to see them with a strong presence.
Again, their booth was more a lounge rather than a place to have technology demos and talks. They did have a great supply of giveaways./li>
Amazon - had a smaller booth, and the focus seems mostly on code. They posted a code snippet and a contest for solving a problem with it.
Google - Also a very code focused booth. They were talking a lot about code.google.com, their Soureforge competitor.
Facebook - Although I'm sure that any of the companies at OSCOn would love to hire really killer technical talent. And certainly there is good talent there. But the Facebook booth seemed to be totally focused on recruiting people. A little obvious, I guess.
Intel - as is usually the case, Intel's booth was crammed with technology demos, booth talks and an amazing give-away. I'm not sure which of these created the long lines in the booth, but it was pretty full whenever I came by.

The demos showed a good split between hardware geek stuff and software partners.

OpenSolaris on Xeon, particularly showing great tools like PowerTop, which now has a pretty gtk interface.
SuSE running on a Xeon 5500 (formerly Nehalem) server. They were showing an Oracle database, and the tools available for the administrator here.
Moblin, running on Netbooks, Moble Internet Devices and automobiles. This last was really cool - there was a functional open source dialer which successfully called my cell phone!

Because O'Reilly is a media company, there are some booths which don't usually fit in the usual technology conference - publishing companies:

No Starch Press- I love the useful technology titles these guys have, and I really love the art work these guys have on their book covers, in particular a robot pouring coffee into the open door in its head.
Manning - don't know as much about these guys, they seem to have good titles.
Linux Pro Magazine
O'Reilly - hosted a lounge and a very nice book store.

And being an open source conference, there is a selection of what I would call "advocacy" booths: Electronic Fronteir Foundation, Free Software Foundation, the ACLU and FOSSFA which is the Free and Open Source Software for Africa group.

I also usually see one or two things that I learn about. One of these was Schooner. These guys are providing engines with Intel Xeon 5500 series processors (formerly Nehalem) and Intel Solid State Disks or SSDs and their optimized version of Linux, memcached and MySQL. What is really cool about this is that they didn't just put together some great Intel hardware and push the box out. They have added a bunch of value by optimizing the open source software. As a result, they get fantastic performance improvements.

What was also very cool was to see that Schooner's VP of Engineering is Dave Rodgers, who was the VP of engineering at Sequent Computer Systems when I joined them in the 80s. So it was really cool to see Dave and catch up with him.

It's a cool thing to see the various corporate tribes with their logo-ed T-Shirts herding together and mingling in the various lounges.

Join me at OSCON 2009

David Stewart (Intel) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:59:24 +0000

I'm speaking in the OSCON 2009 show floor area at 3:00PM. I'll be in the Intel booth (about as obvious as can be). Come by and hear me talk about Moblin.

How to develop apps for Moblin

David Stewart (Intel) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:52:34 +0000

More OSCON 2009 observaations

Rob Bradford gave an excellent talk right after the keynotes on develoment of applications for Moblin. I really like Rob's talks, because he is quite energetic and makes good use of photos in his slides, which don't look at all like most Intel presentation slides.

The content seemed similar to a talk I heard Rob give at the Linux Collaboration Summit this year. It's a really good overview of:

What does Moblin look like and how does it appear to the user
What are the key components for the Moblin OS
Then Rob walks through an example step by step showing the steps for designing a new application for the Moblin user experience (or UX as we call it).

Here are the basic steps of getting an application from concept to finished application.

The Sketch - this is the beginning of the dialog between the designer and the developer. And here, Rob introduces some key elements of how you develop a Moblin appication. Here he touches on UI toolkits such as NBTK, which is built on top of GTK and Clutter.
The wireframe - an evolution from the sketch, there is more evolution from a basic outline of how things look to how the thing might work with a little more content involved. As part of this step, Rob introduced the Mojito project, where you can get automated interaction with web services such as Twitter, Flickr, etc.
The icing - OK, the application is displaying things, it's pulling in content, and now it's time to make it look nice. Let's work on the visual interaction. More iteration is required here with the designer to improve the visual design.

I thought Rob improves on this talk every time I hear him. He seems more relaxed while maintaining his energy.

Dirk Hohndel gives Intel keynote at OSCON 2009

David Stewart (Intel) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:08:07 +0000

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.

"Jane! Stop this crazy thing!" (... called Moblin)

David Stewart (Intel) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:59:42 +0000

Over the past month or so, I viewed all of the episodes of "The Jetsons on DVD." I grew up in the 1960s in the US, and this show formed the unconscious fabric of our thinking about how the future would look, feel and behave.

The end credits of that series showed the same little scene - George Jetson, the dad of our little family, has just come home from his day at the office, and instead of relaxing with pipe and slippers, his chore is to walk the dog, Astro, on some treadmill hanging in the sky.

All is well for a beat, and then in a classic Hanna-Barbera moment, Astro is no longer walking on the treadmill, but George is being thrashed on the belt, which has accelerated to running speed.

"Jane! Stop this crazy thing!" - George yells.

The treadmill anticipated the user's desire to go faster (because Astro started chasing a cat) but failed to recognize the need to stop.

One of the things I truly love about the Moblin user interface is that there is no "off" button. This is because it is already the most natural thing to do in Moblin, almost as if it anticipates the user's desire to do so.

Don't believe me? Here are some examples:

When I want to shut off my cell phone, I just hit the power switch, the same thing I did to turn it on.
How about my TV? Same thing, just hit the power button, same thing I did to turn it on.
How about my car? A lamp? Desk phone?
TREADMILL? Oh, well I suppose they do have a "stop" button. But that's because it could hurt you badly if you didn't have it there, right?

In fact, almost everything turns off in a reversal (or repetition) of the action you took to turn it on.

So how do you boot Moblin? You hit the power button on your netbook. How do you turn if off? Um, same way. No need for some "shutdown" in the user interface. In fact, when you hit the power button, you see an almost instant off behavior. Nice!

In fact, I remember some other computer operating system that came out in the 1990s which required you to hit the "Start" button to shut it down. Now that's intuitive! And guess what, every OS decided to follow suit!

But not Moblin. It kind of makes sense.

What's cool about Moblin?

David Stewart (Intel) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 04:10:38 +0000

My good friends at the Intel Software Network have launched a terrific new way to deliver technology videos to the community: ISN TV.

For their launch this week, they invited me to give a brief interview on Moblin v2.0, which had its beta release last month. This was a fun way to show you the really cool features like the social networking integration, fast boot and shutdown, and some of the philosophy behind Moblin. I hope you enjoy it!

If you are reading this from a feed-reader, visit this link to see the original video.

Two Years Later: Why Linux people still lust after DTrace

David Stewart (Intel) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:36:21 +0000

Bill Pearson from the Intel Software Network posted a declaration of a party on the occasion of the 2000th blog post on ISN.

One of the highlights he listed was the conversation which was engendered by a post I did about two years ago called "Why Linux people lust after DTrace." My intent was simply to write up the notes from a talk I had attended by Bryan Cantrill from Sun about DTrace, and some random musings based on my own shaggy dog history in the industry.

Frankly, I wasn't prepared for the resulting thunderstorm of comments on my blog, as well as the comments which popped up on other blogs which referenced my post. Suddenly I had a steady stream of comments and post views on a topic that, well to be honest, I wasn't prepared to address. Heck, it was just a random post, why was there so much response?

And better yet, how could I replicate this outpouring of passion?

Since I posted this, I have learned a lot more about DTrace. The community has extended DTrace probes into MySQL, JavaScript and Python, to name a few. Intel extended DTrace to support an OpenSolaris version of PowerTop. (And I believe there are other DTrace-based tools which are forthcoming). I also learned more about similar options in Linux, and the pros and cons vs. DTrace.

Here's a shout-out to Bill for mentioning my humble little post in his 2000th post party!

And, a little full-circle irony here: In the original post, I commented on how Oracle engineers in particular wished they had a version of DTrace for Linux. I guess with the coming acquisition of Sun by Oracle, they may be able to finally satisfy their lust for DTrace!

Congrats to the OpenSolaris team for 2009.06

David Stewart (Intel) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:59:37 +0000

Although I'm not working actively on OpenSolaris any more, I was happy to see the launch today of OpenSolaris 2009.06. See Glenn's announcement email here.

The download of the LiveCD distro went down without a hitch, and was surprisingly fast for the day of launch. Kudos to whomever set up the web infrastructure for day-of-launch. (I think Intel could learn something from you guys...)

I loaded it up in a VirtualBox v2.2 guest (on my Intel Corei7 desktop no less) and it fired up beautifully. Some things I noticed right away:

The visual presentation continues to be polished. I liked the graphical boot which hides all of the (granted very cool) initial startup of ZFS and one-time processing of the SMF manifests. These are details that only a geek like me could love, but frankly make the older text-based startup look more messy. Text startup is still available if you need to debug something. The default desktop wallpaper is cool as well.
I was amazed that full Compiz desktop optimization was working flawlessly in VirtualBox guest. I'm not sure if this is a testament to the VIrtualBox guys or the OpenSolaris guys, but the 3D support seems better than with some of the other client OS's I have been loading up lately.
Finally, I have been watching things progress, and I know that there are some incredibly cool technology innovations in this OS, particularly with a native Nehalem system. For example, I saw a PowerTop screen cap that showed time in Turbo Mode, all of the deep C states and some more interesting wakeups to pick through. There is the new Power Aware Dispatcher too, which migrates threads to minimize power usage. This could move OpenSolaris into the lead in terms of power management, particularly when the tickless scheduler is done.

Nice job overall, guys. I know there are a lot of great Intel and Sun and community improvements. Keep it up! See the web site for a download.

Moblin Beta and VirtualBox

David Stewart (Intel) — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:47:53 +0000

Yesterday I installed Moblin version 2 Beta on my Asus eeePC 901, a netbook with a little Atom processor in it. It's been fun to walk it around with me yesterday and today showing people the future of our work here.

I thought it would be kind of cool to try it out in a virtual machine on my Core i7 desktop system (previously code named Nehalem).

So I loaded up the latest VirtualBox v2.2 from the web site, copied the .img file, and fired it up.

The live CD install went well, and to my pleasant surprise, before too long I was gazing at the M-Zone. Everything worked! I was surprised because Moblin makes a lot of use of the 3D graphics subsystem and needs compositing working before it will work correctly. But I was able to navigate around reasonably well.

Now it wasn't perfect. The animated desktop didn't really function the same way it would on a real netbook. In fact, the animations didn't work at all. And the screen size seemed off for some reason. But as I said, it was at least serviceable.

I did set up the virtual machine to have 3D acceleration enabled and threw 64M at the virtualized graphics card.

The Dawn of the Age of Moblin!

David Stewart (Intel) — Wed, 20 May 2009 04:43:25 +0000

The public beta of Moblin v2 is here!

If you don't know about Moblin, read Imad's blog for a complete introduction to the operating system, including a lot of good links. In fact, I'm typing this from my Asus eeePC 901 running Moblin.

Some of my favorite features:

Social media integration - I think Moblin will become famous as the first OS to really be designed with the Internet designed in from the ground up. And the way people use the Internet these days is with social media apps like Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. Moblin beta has Twitter and Last.fm built in now, will have more later. The very desktop is built in with social media and can be extensible to new internet services.
Fast boot - the boot time on my flash-based netbook is fantastic, beats anything out there.
Animated user experience - I've played with a lot of animated desktops like compiz and the like. This one beats all.

This has been a great story for some of the legendary open source experts at Intel. I'm proud of the accomplishments so far, and more to come.

It is a beta, so set expectations accordingly that we need the community to test it and file bugs and help us to make it better.

PowerTOP: Dave enters a video game

David Stewart (Intel) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 09:35:32 +0000

Always wanted to see Dave Stewart fragged, as in "killed in a video game" ?

Yes, I knew you did. Ah, yet another analogy goes haywire.

This is another in a series of digital shorts about work Intel is doing in OpenSolaris. (Have I really done 15 of these things). This one is about PowerTOP, and how you can use it to "green" your software applications and drivers. I also talk about our use of DTrace to collect the information. And too, the video production guys have fun with a few special effects as well. Enjoy.

(If you're wondering, the T-Shirt is from the inaugural Nomiki of the Tokyo OpenSolaris User's Group).

(As always, you will "score a hit" if you watch all the way to the end of the video).

Original video source here.

YouTube version also available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga4iJH2ip0Y