swetland

14 ms·

91.
by swetland 12y ago
Galaxy Nexus did (though that's not particularly recent). I suspect most Tegra-based devices do -- though they introduced a combo apps/model Tegra 4i last year, which likely shares resources. Generally if it has a standalone apps
92.
by swetland 12y ago
I think that's possibly overkill. Provided the baseband processor is independent of the apps processor, communicates over a managed bus (usb, high speed serial, dedicated dual-port ram), instead of having direct access to main system
93.
by swetland 12y ago
Jeff's LispMicrocontroller is another example of this sort of thing (but a bit further along, it seems): https://github.com/jbush001/LispMicrocontroller
94.
by swetland 12y ago
Depends what you're doing -- DE0 Nano is nice for integrating into larger projects, but if you want to say implement a little CPU and peripherals, something like the plain 'ol DE0 is only slightly more expensive and has a bunch of
95.
by swetland 12y ago
That the toolchains run on Linux at all at least prevents one from being forced to use Windows, which is a plus, but yes, the state of FPGA tools is pretty horrible. It reminds me of the days of proprietary vendor compilers where every plat
96.
by swetland 12y ago
Oddly (for how detailed it is in other places) this skips the actual wire protocol side of enumeration -- reset device, read descriptors, assign address, etc. Enumeration is an interesting process -- newly reset devices accept transfers to
97.
by swetland 12y ago
To the best of my knowledge (I'd love a pointer to details if I'm wrong), the reason Kindle has DRM at all is entirely due to publisher demands for it.
98.
by swetland 12y ago
Yeah, I am baffled by the reaction to this. Don't want to use DRM, don't install the plugin, no DRM, done. Long-term I can't see how video would end up being any different than audio (and I can buy non-DRM-encumbered mp3&#x2
99.
by swetland 12y ago
I don't get the hand-wringing over this. Don't install the plugin and only view non-DRM-encumbered video content. Seems simple enough. Just like you don't install flash because you don't want to support flash-based DR
100.
by swetland 13y ago
Dianne's response to the recent "AOSP is unusable" silliness is pretty solid: http://www.hnwatcher.com/r/734444/Google-s-Dianne-Hackborn-c... Regarding drivers, we expended a lot of effort to push t
101.
by swetland 13y ago
Typically these services are intended to allow the modem to access factor calibration data, possibly page firmware in, or to store nonvolatile information it needs longer term. They should be restricted to just storing data on behalf of
102.
by swetland 13y ago
The modems in question here don't have direct access to system ram or flash, which is why Samsung is using an RPC mechanism to the application processor to store data on behalf of the modem (which quite possibly has no local flash at a
103.
by swetland 13y ago
I'm still not seeing docs on how to send content to Chromecast without using the Android, IOS, or Chrome APIs for doing so. Pointers? How would I build a commandline app to send content to Chromecast, for example? (see the list unde
104.
by swetland 13y ago
"Due to the complexities of the 8086’s arbitrary-length instruction decoding and flags, 8086 instructions are first converted to a simpler intermediate format before being executed. This conversion, along with instruction lengths and h
105.
by swetland 13y ago
I'll have to give this a look sometime (though I'll likely hold out until they have it stable on Nexus 7). Adding a 540MB swap file is pretty crazy though. I'd rather not have stuff swapping to the (relatively slow and seria
106.
by swetland 13y ago
Because splatting object files and intermediates all over the same directories as the source drives me nuts, I shuffled things so that it's a bit easier to find things (splitting source into kernel/, user/, ulib/, tools&
107.
by swetland 13y ago
The reality is you just don't need to write a whole lot of assembly day-to-day so using what the tools support best tends to be the path of least resistance. Xv6 itself has about 5000 lines of .c and 364 lines of .S in the kernel. Ano
108.
by swetland 13y ago
It's definitely 32-bit only, but structurally it's simple enough that converting to 64-bit might not be a huge effort (and the kernel is only about 6kloc of .c files). I haven't done x86 systems stuff since 64bit became commo
109.
by swetland 13y ago
There's some inefficiency here in that wake() doesn't cause the other cpu to wake immediately from hlt so it'll remain halted until the next timer tick or whatnot. It'd be fun to add some scheduler stats and poke around
110.
by swetland 13y ago
Nice catch. Actually speeds everything up a bunch. I did it a bit more tersely with: if (p == &ptable.proc[NPROC]) hlt(); after the sti() and initializing p to 0;
111.
by swetland 13y ago
Doesn't seem like it'd be a big ordeal. Just adapt an existing bootloader to load the kernel. Also it looks like they mostly run it in qemu.
112.
by swetland 13y ago
Looks like it's still 3.2 based: http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64
113.
by swetland 13y ago
Thanks. I was puzzled that there seemed to be no 7.2 to 7.3 release notes or change lists linked from the original URL... just stuff about 7.0.
114.
by swetland 13y ago
The Android platform is open source under Apache/BSD/MIT licenses -- it's no harder to get that than it ever has been (not hard at all). Look at products like Kindle Fire for examples of "uses Android without Google App
115.
by swetland 13y ago
I forget what the old setting was, but there was a G+ setting about showing +1s in other contexts, which I recall unchecking when I was unchecking all the "email me about..." settings and other cruft in the G+ settings. Looks lik
116.
by swetland 13y ago
Even NVIDIA takes this approach on their mobile integrated GPUs on Tegra (GPL'd kernel driver). I wish they'd do so on the desktop too. Having the kernel driver (which really does not need to be all that much code) be open source
117.
by swetland 13y ago
If this were about PR it wouldn't be a post to a technical mailing list about a single document being dropped and mention of work going on to provide more (but unlikely all) docs in the future. Just because two things happen on the sam
118.
by swetland 13y ago
I'm skeptical this is related to steamos/steambox. Nvidia's already working to ensure their proprietary drivers work as well on Linux as Windows and probably considers maintaining one codebase to be far less of a headache. I
119.
by swetland 13y ago
Proprietary drivers and firmware are really two separate issues. Proprietary drivers usually are the result of licensed code that can't be open sourced or IP concerns (giving away the "secret sauce", patent worries, etc). Pro
120.
by swetland 13y ago
That's the model we've ended up with with most of the mobile GPU drivers in Android -- open source kernel side managing resources and queueing and proprietary goop in a library in userspace where it can do limited harm (can't

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