Eliminate dependency on licensed code in Marvell firmware.

[jg]

We are using a Marvell Wireless chip; it has an ARM 9 processor and something like 96K of RAM.

Marvell licensed a proprietary microkernel as a framework for developing their firmware for the chip.

Since Marvell does not own this code, it is not theirs to give away, though much/most of the code now in the firmware is not encumbered. A suitably motivated person could take the OLPC code and retarget it for some other small embedded operating system (e.g. TinyOS, maybe), and then the firmware could itself be open source.

This would be very nice indeed, but OLPC itself does not have the resources to put into this. If someone volunteers, we can make the code available for porting to a free system.

[marcelo]

Requires documentation/cooperation from Marvell about the internal workings of the chip.

Are they willing to go that route?

[mfoster]

Hi, Marcelo!

Actually, we'll have no problem getting started under NDA. Once that's in place for the core developers, we'd then move to an alternate O.S., and we could then be truly Open Source.

Cheers! MarkF

P.S. This should actually be assigned to mbletsas@…, but he doesn't have a Trac account yet.

[mfoster]

Improper assignment. This is mbletsas' area of responsibility. Sorry!

[RafaelOrtiz]

Replying to krstic:

[cjb]

Rafael Ortiz says:

Is there any posibility to use a different chip with O.S Firmware in the future...?

The Marvell chip has very specific features that are essential to us -- stores its routing table in RAM, can forward packets through the mesh at low power while the main CPU is off, etc. We could only consider using a replacement if one existed with these features.

[AlbertCahalan]

I'd like to give it a try. Please send documentation.

[palfrey]

Add me to CC. I have experience with building radio-interfacing code in TinyOS for a couple of platforms, and I've be interested in seeing what could be done here.

[bobkeyes]

Replying to mfoster:

Hi, Marcelo! Actually, we'll have no problem getting started under NDA. Once that's in place for the core developers, we'd then move to an alternate O.S., and we could then be truly Open Source.

I'd be interested in helping out the porting to tinyos or similar, so the firmware could become open source. People involved: please send me some email about how to get started.

[AlbertCahalan]

See also:

bug #429

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Libertas

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/88W8388

[Mokurai]

We're going to have a go at this. See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Marvell_microkernel for orientation.

[shirish]

sorry don't know if the action should be to never set or not. Just wanted to add myself to the bug, please revert if I did something by mistake.