On marketing and buzzwords

[_wb_]

I agree with most of what Jebe said. In my opinion, most of this discussion boils down to the old "open source" vs "free software" debate, with the Android camp firmly at the side of "open source". Having options is nice, and of course "open source" is still vastly better than proprietary shite. I don't mind if my Pandora can run Android, if OPT can sell more units or get access to nice hardware by supporting Android, fine. But I'm probably never going to use it myself, and I hope the Pandora community stays focused on creating an optimal GNU/Linux experience on the Pandora.

Not everything in Android is open-source, though. Of course, all the Google applications Android calls have very closed server side software. And that's part of the Android package, whether you like or not, it's integrated. At least a Linux distro is not permanently leaking data to a specific single party and you know where your data is going out and coming in.

Yes, that aspect of Android is very ugly and evil. It essentially makes Android comparable to the iOS on iPad/iPhone. It is for this reason that I don't think the adjective "Open" is suitable to describe Android (or the Ouya for that matter).

 

[ekianjo]

Yes, that aspect of Android is very ugly and evil. It essentially makes Android comparable to the iOS on iPad/iPhone. It is for this reason that I don't think the adjective "Open" is suitable to describe Android (or the Ouya for that matter).

Yeah, Android is pretty much the same thing as iOS in that regard. The only advantage of Android is that you can make applications for it more easily, but I have the same concerns as for all the Apple devices: you cannot program FOR Android UNDER Android. You need to do it on a PC, separately, with proper IDE and compiler and so on. iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets are all asymetric devices that encourage consumption over creation and tinkering.


For me this is the principal reason why I do not think Android is a good fit with the Pandora : I like the Pandora because you can literately create on it. Pushing for Android is going against the spirit of the device as I see it, and will bring more "pure consumers" on this machine in the end, which is not what we need for the system. We need more creators as well.

 

[SNESFAN]

I agree with most of what Jebe said. In my opinion, most of this discussion boils down to the old "open source" vs "free software" debate, with the Android camp firmly at the side of "open source". Having options is nice, and of course "open source" is still vastly better than proprietary shite. I don't mind if my Pandora can run Android, if OPT can sell more units or get access to nice hardware by supporting Android, fine. But I'm probably never going to use it myself, and I hope the Pandora community stays focused on creating an optimal GNU/Linux experience on the Pandora.

Not everything in Android is open-source, though. Of course, all the Google applications Android calls have very closed server side software. And that's part of the Android package, whether you like or not, it's integrated. At least a Linux distro is not permanently leaking data to a specific single party and you know where your data is going out and coming in.

Yes, that aspect of Android is very ugly and evil. It essentially makes Android comparable to the iOS on iPad/iPhone. It is for this reason that I don't think the adjective "Open" is suitable to describe Android (or the Ouya for that matter).

You guys are confusing android that is shipped on phones with AOSP the os is fully useable without the google software. And it is not included in AOSP, if you are going to start accusing them at least make sure those facts are straight.


So they are evil because they use the open os and make closed source apps for it? That's what you two are saying correct? Or is it just for the 5 or so apps that they are evil? Just trying to see where the finger is being pointed.


@mcobit check out mono for android, its not AOSP main, it's a fork of the project


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[_wb_]

They are evil because they require your personal information before even allowing you to install software, and for making "cloud" software for which you don't even get a copy of the binaries since the software runs on their servers. They want to keep total control over everything (esp. Apple), and in general have a worldview in which all the good devs should come and work for them (directly or indirectly) and the other 99.9% of the population should be passive consumers that buy their software but aren't allowed to use their computing device as a general purpose computer which they can use for whatever they want.

 

[SNESFAN]

I think we are talking about 2 different things here... google being evil, thats fine, not questioning that.


Android isn't evil nor does it include cloud or closed apps though. Google "owns" android but android isn't google.. theres a difference. Google has cloud apps and gives them to hardware manufacturers that ship android devices.


No data is being sent to a big brother if you use plain vanilla android without your consent. The examples out there of it happening are put there intentionally by the hardware developers, the same ones that put the google propritary apps on a otherwise fully open os.


Thats my point


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[craigix]

They are evil because they require your personal information before even allowing you to install software, and for making "cloud" software for which you don't even get a copy of the binaries since the software runs on their servers. They want to keep total control over everything (esp. Apple), and in general have a worldview in which all the good devs should come and work for them (directly or indirectly) and the other 99.9% of the population should be passive consumers that buy their software but aren't allowed to use their computing device as a general purpose computer which they can use for whatever they want.

Google are not 'Evil' big banks and oil companies are Evil.


Google would probably show up as 'sometimes irritating' on the scale.

 

[Grench]

I think we are talking about 2 different things here... google being evil, thats fine, not questioning that.


Android isn't evil nor does it include cloud or closed apps though. Google "owns" android but android isn't google.. theres a difference. Google has cloud apps and gives them to hardware manufacturers that ship android devices.


No data is being sent to a big brother if you use plain vanilla android without your consent. The examples out there of it happening are put there intentionally by the hardware developers, the same ones that put the google propritary apps on a otherwise fully open os.


Thats my point


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Agreed. There does seem to be a lot of confusion, though, between Android as a Linux OS fork and Android as it is skinned, locked down, restricted and presented on smart phones sold by near monopoly mobile phone companies.


Android itself ins't any more evil than a table lamp. It's when someone takes it and beats the snot out of you with it that is evil.

 

[Exophase]

Android isn't a Linux fork. Your totally open, rooted, not-locked-down whatever Android will still fail to run anything made for a standard Linux distribution. It's different by design. It's fundamental. Not something you can do much to hack around.


And as far as the Ubuntu/Android project goes the details are still pretty vague on how they inter-operate exactly. It could easily be that entire cores are pegged for one or the other, with memory carved out statically between the two beforehand. You can run completely different operating systems simultaneously on a muti-core device so long as it was communicated to both, by the bootloader, what cores and memory they were allowed access to. Ubuntu's frequent mention of multicore phones with a lot of memory at least hints at this as a possibility. Running both conventional Linux and Android off the same kernel simultaneously with the same machine resources would be really challenging.


If this does happen to be the case it'd be far from ideal performance-wise, especially if Pandora 2's SoC only has two cores (if they use OMAP5 this will most likely be the case since there's no quad core OMAP5 announced)

 

[mcobit]

Omap5 will have 2 additional M4 cores and two other dedicated chips for stuff to be offloaded to them by the System. Of course this will make sense, if you use something like android, which was tuned to use them.


This might be the reason, why they want the Pandora people to use with android, as it will be using all this already and is tuned to it.


A normal linux distribution might be much slower on such a soc, as it can't use all the features out of the box and there will be no software using them, just like the dsp in the current Pandora.

 

[Exophase]

I don't think you'd want to call it much slower, just not as optimized for doing some really specific tasks that are offloaded to those coprocessors. For a lot of things people want to actually use Pandora 2 for a normal Linux distro will still be faster even if the peripheral hardware isn't as well utilized.


Seems it was cleared up, that whoever is providing the SoC is only willing to give Android software support right now.. not requiring OPT to ship it with Android in order to buy the SoC. Naturally the SoC vendor will invest more time in providing support software that'll actually get used commonly.

 

[ShleeDragon]

Android isn't a Linux fork. Your totally open, rooted, not-locked-down whatever Android will still fail to run anything made for a standard Linux distribution. It's different by design. It's fundamental. Not something you can do much to hack around.

This is the last time I'll raise this. but I figure it's good for common knowledge.


Android will still run kernel modules and user land applications. I think we need to be clear. Android just takes control of as much of the hardware as it can. So Xorg/X11 and anything similar is killed and your system is dedicated more than usual.


"fail to run anything made for a standard Linux distribution." is kinda false. That is only true for anything which requires X11/GTK/QT or similar. A nice common cli compiled with glibc or similar will run perfectly fine. If you like CLI programs, you're fine. Not that it matters 90% of the time for the average pandora user.

 

[mcobit]

I never questioned, that the soc will be faster anyway.


Just which linux distro will put the maincores idle and use the m4 cores to react to input handling etc. by default?


There needs to be some software handling and supervising this and I would think, as android will be the main software to be used on those socs, when they get into tablets and phones this is the software that will be optimized for those tasks first.


So yes, you are not required to use android, but it might have serious advantages from the get go.

 

[slaeshjag]

Aren't the M4 core microcontroller class stuff anyway? I doubt they will give much to a running system

 

[ShleeDragon]

do we have any idea what the actual target SOC is? the OMAP 5 series is only dualcore with no lowpower. for the first launch SOCs


P.S. trick question. we don't.

 

[SNESFAN]

I know its nowhere near testable, so in the contex of ubuntu + android just hypothetical nonsense. But the a15 is susposed to use virtualization right? Couldnt you multiple os's at once on top of a host? The two os's could share resources and even interact with each other. And at almost little to no performance loss? One basically idle while the other is active etc.


I know this is more like what you are saying exo by segregating each instead of them acutally snatching resources from each other. I can only imagine how androids task killing resource manager would play well with a standard linux one.


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[mcobit]

I think this is what TI aims at:


From here:


http://www.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?templateId=6123&navigationId=12866&contentId=102763


"With mature, tested and validated software, handset manufacturers and applications developers will have faster development and will be ensured real-world use cases. Support of multiple mobile OSes on a single platform gives customers the flexibility to address multiple segments of the Smartphone and MID markets with minimal redesign. In addition, with the introduction of the ARM® Cortex™-A15 MPCore with hardware virtualization support, the OMAP 5 platform can support multiple OSes running on the same platform at the same time."

 

[ShleeDragon]

Couldnt you multiple os's at once on top of a host? The two os's could share resources and even interact with each other. And at almost little to no performance loss? One basically idle while the other is active etc.

Adds more abstraction and won't work with the GPU as decent passthru is yet to be functional. It adds more complexity. slows things down and increases management resources. plus there isn't any real virt solutions for ARM.


KVM is x86 only. Xen has an arm port but it's a pre-alpha thing at the moment. plus remember, it won't give lowlevel access which we REQUIRE for performance. You can pretty much offer guests with emulated GPUs.


Abstraction is bad. notaz needs low level to show off his stuff.

 

[slaeshjag]

KVM is x86 only? Then what was that I read about KVM coming to MIPS that I read about this afternoon?

 

[FRZ]

kickstarter is the way to go, http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/09/ouyas-kickstarter-funding-is-complete-over-8-5-million-raised/ . You'll get all the marketing you need.

 

[mcobit]

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD5Nu-VrHKI