Moblin, big production of minor systems

Author: Wang Yun

If we were late in an interview with intel, we would be able to get more information from Intel's acquisition of Wind River, a chip vendor with hundreds of times more confidence on smaller devices.

On the morning of November 30, (Wang Yun), Li xiaobi arrived in the conference room half an hour earlier than the scheduled interview time and reorganized the PPT to be presented to the media.

Up to 30 slides not only contain the features of moblin V2.0 beta, but more importantly, we seem to see some signs of Intel's readiness for embedded development.

Mr. Li, who has been engaged in Embedded System Technology for nine years, has been in intel for nine years. He is now the manager of the application technology support team of Intel's SSG Partnership Department. He is still careful in his words until the last minute before the interview, how to make people understand that moblin is the name of a project, and its core is a cross-platform operating system. Intel hopes that in the mobile Internet era, people can enjoy the Internet through moblin, and industry partners can jointly improve on this platform.

 

The mobile Internet era has reached

 

It is undeniable that we are in the mobile Internet era. netbooks, 3G mobile phones, and mid are leading the Internet trend. Unfortunately, although surfing the internet anytime and anywhere has become a reality, the online experience is not as good as imagined. The reason is obvious.

Real mobile Internet experience requires certain conditions, such as a large enough screen, such as a strong graphic processing capability, such as a fast speed, for both software and hardware, for example, more applications. At the earliest, the Internet was actually born for PC, and technology has repeatedly evolved for Internet applications on PC. Therefore, when using a mobile phone or other mobile devices to access the Internet, various problems may occur, such as slow network speeds, too few applications, and poor visual effects of images and videos.

"We hope to make some efforts and try to address the current problems on the mobile Internet. From the terminal device perspective, we place ultra-portable mobile internet devices. From the software perspective, we have moblin, "Li said." moblin has four goals: entertainment, automotive electronics, portable and mobile, and embedded systems."

After conquering minicomputers, x86 servers, desktops, and laptops, Intel began to focus on smaller devices, netbooks, mid, automotive entertainment systems, and even smart phones. Moblin is a powerful tool.

 

Why is moblin?

 

Why does moblin assume this responsibility? In Intel's software and service division (SSG) Asia Pacific Partnership Department and strategic business development department director He Shufen's words, that is the demand boost.

He Shufen said that intel has been playing the role of promoter in technology, and any of the most advanced technologies hope to cooperate with partners (including software and hardware partners) immediately, let them first use our most advanced technology to develop and update products for end users. Moblin was launched for this purpose.

However, there seems to be no urgent demand in the middle.

Li Yu further explained this statement. There are now a lot of products based on Intel's Atom processor, such as netbooks. However, the emergence of netbooks requires applications suitable for netbooks. For example, if you want to access the Internet anytime, anywhere, you need some different applications that are suitable for this screen. This difference directly led to the birth of moblin. This allows all partners to develop a series of Internet applications suitable for mobile platforms and a wide range of Internet applications on the moblin software platform.

Moblin is an open-source platform and compatible with it. It is suitable for from netbook to mid, and then to on-board entertainment systems or even smaller devices. That is to say, only one development is required, to generate cross-platform applications.

Technically, Li told us more about the benefits of moblin. For example, the technology improvement of power management is carried out with low-power lingdong chips, it includes different sleep modes, wake-up modes, and power-off of each CPU. It also optimizes the cold start and shutdown times. Li Yun uses a number to illustrate the advantages of moblin in power management. In the lab, a netbook can be started in five seconds.

In terms of Advanced User Interface Support, moblin has also been improved, including physical engine effects, touch screen keyboard I/0 experience, and so on. It is reflected on the user end, which is now popular with transparency and rendering.

For developers, Intel provides a relatively complete secondary development package, hoping to make development of moblin easier. Intel will make some efforts in Linux kernel, drivers, device management, application framework, user interaction framework, and part of it.

The third point is the support of the browser plug-in and media format. This has always been Intel's strength. In other words, it is the support of codecs and the playback of various media.

 

Cooperation around moblin

 

In China, Li Yun's team mainly works with various software vendors to optimize their software. For example, how to make a game run faster on moblin than on other platforms, and how to make B's codecs play smoother than on other platforms. At the same time, they also need to communicate more with OSV and OEM so that moblin can truly become a product to reach the user end.

Moblin is one meter away from finished products, which comes from operating system integrators (OSV ). In other words, these osvs will use the moblin architecture to build a truly productized software on top as the final product release.

In the moblin.org community, the operating system providers bring open-source projects, moblin, and third-party applications, and integrate the three into a real operating system according to the OEM, then deliver the final customer. This is a typical moblin working mode.

Intel has been emphasizing the cross-platform compatibility of moblin, which refers to different platforms. This platform can be a software platform or a hardware platform, including on-board, mobile, industrial applications, and communication.

Currently, moblin has around 15 osvs, each of which has its own operating system. How can these operating systems be compatible? Is the same application compatible with different operating systems? In this regard, Intel provides a tool, moblin compatibility testing suite (MCT ). It will overwrite the above two compatibility issues for verification. In other words, as an application software developer, if you put the developed software on the MCT and run it again, if there is no problem, then it will be OK.

Intel has already worked closely with 15 osvs and 20 OEMs, and has also established a strategic alliance with Novell. Novell transfers all its applications on the desktop to moblin, and then both parties will promote it together. Novell has some Novell platform developers who will take the initiative to promote moblin, Intel will also help them promote the application transfer on their desktops in the industry.

That is to say, an industry chain based on mobile devices such as netbook, mid, and on-board entertainment systems is emerging.

 

Embedded Development

 

Li Yun mentioned several times in his interview that Intel's cooperation with Wind River, on the PPT he presented, this embedded system vendor that was just acquired by Intel emerged as a partner in on-board electronic systems.

In addition to handheld communication devices and Vertical Industrial Applications, embedded systems are also one of the markets moblin wants to tap. Li believes that the moblin and lingdong platforms can do a lot of work on embedded systems. For example, there is a very large market-monitoring market. There are many monitoring companies in China that will adopt a variety of solutions. Some need to compress 16 channels of signals at the same time, so there is no small frame, which requires a high-performance encoder. However, at the front-end, a handheld device is required. It does not need to be 15 frames per second. You only need to check three or five frames per second. Although they are two different working states, you can choose the same system-"This can be applied using moblin or atom platforms ." Said Li.

"Moblin is an open-source project based on Intel Atom processor-optimized Linux operating system. It provides optimized operating systems with the ultimate goal of true and rich Internet and multimedia applications ." Now, Li Yun and his team have good products and partners. What we need to do next is to find a large number of mobile Internet users, this is probably a more difficult task.

 

Source: Binet