Comments on: PalmSource and MontaVista Team on Next Gen Linux Phones

The Palm OS middleware is still proprietary and commercial, but PalmSource has a lot to gain from companies like MontaVista that deliver a Linux kernel with all the system support software for particular chipsets and hardware. It's partly because PalmSource was trying to do it all themselves that they got into trouble with getting Cobalt out the door. Better to have partners like MontaVista helping with stuff like this than telling licensees that they have to roll their own version of the kernel, services, drivers, etc.

MontaVista for their part seem pretty enthusiastic as well. They gotta see the prospect of having Palm OS with its 30,000 apps and loyal following running with MontaVista Linux under the hood to be a pretty nice picture.

It's all good.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com

Surur

First of all, that's not exactly true about the multi-tasking in Cobalt. It's true that stuff running in background threads has to share a process with the other background threads. Everything in PACE has to run in a single process, too, of course. It's like a virtual machine. But any running application that's updated to the Protein API gets to run in its own process and protected memory just like in any other modern OS. All that is a big improvement over Garnet. Even the sharing of a process for the background threads (IMO, not a big deal) has a payoff in terms of better performance relative to the way WM does it. The reason for this is that being able to put an upward limit on the number of processes spawned allows the ARM processor to do some very fast context switching. That means multi-tasking has much less of a hit on performance.

At any rate, all of this is about the kernel, not the Palm OS framework built on top. From what I understand, ARM Linux is more like WM in the way it deals with multi-tasking. That's good and bad. Good because everything gets its own process (more robust). Bad because when you do multi-tasking it will have more of a performance hit than it would with the Cobalt kernel.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com

No, not the press release. That's fluff. What's interesting is what people are reading into it. I don't see anything in that article that says that PalmSource is going to use MonteVista's Linux kernel, or that MontaVista has signed a deal with any of PalmSource's licensees. We'll just have to see what this deal really means. I don't think that "partner" means what you might think it does.

Meanwhile, "arm Linux" is a Linux kernel. You get exactly what you get on a desktop. Including Linux process management and kernel threads, meaning that applications people can partitition their aps into processes that are multithreaded.

Oh, and you can get it from the open source community for no fee, if you'd like to check it out. The omap patches at muru.com added to a 2.6.11 or 2.6.12 kernel result in a very stable system on a TI Perseus 2 development system, for example. I understand that the folks over at handhelds.org are doing interesting things around the Intel arm processors.

The interesting question, ala Unix phones will be trolltech versus maemo versus PalmOS. Too soon to tell how that's going to pan out.

My aging memory tells me that at DevCon PalmSource did say that they would have a reference distribution. It's something licensees would want, so I'd be surprised if they don't.