I just came back from the annual OpenEmbedded Developer Meeting (OEDEM) which happened to be in Cambridge, UK. It was a very productive meeting and we agreed on some important things to move OpenEmbedded forward as a whole. Please see the mailing lists for meeting minutes and summaries. We also elected a new board for the e.V. and despite the grief that led to me leaving the OE core team (which subsequently lead to the dissolving of it), I have volunteered (and been reelected) to serve a 2nd year as board member.

As written in a previous installment of this column, I have dedicated the lion’s share of 2009 to the reimplementation of the freesmartphone.org APIs in Vala. Please see the wiki for architectural details, as I don’t want to repeat this here. This is an overview of the current status:

fsousaged

fsousaged has been fully completed and is being used for quite a while now in distributions. All of the plugins are working:

• dbus_service: Implementation of resource handling as per org.freesmartphone.Usage.
• lowlevel_kernel26: Low level suspend/resume handling for Linux 2.6.
• lowlevel_openmoko: Low level suspend/resume handling for Openmoko Smartphones GTA01/GTA02.

fsodeviced

fsodeviced has been fully completed, but is not yet being used in any distributions. All of the plugins are working:

• accelerometer: generic accelerometer handling, needs one of the device-specific accelerometer plugins.
• accelerometer_lis302: lis 302 accelerometer support.
• alsa_audio: alsa audio PCM output and routing (scenario) support.
• kernel_idle: system idle notifications.
• kernel_input: system input handling.
• kernel_info: kernel information.
• kernel26_display: display class-device based brightness control.
• kernel26_rtc: realtime clock, wakeup alarm.
• kernel26_leds: LED class-device based brightness control.
• kernel26_powersupply: peripheral power supply control.
• openmoko_powercontrol: device-specific power supply controls for Openmoko devices.
• thinkpad_powercontrol: device-specific power supply controls for IBM Thinkpad devices.

fsotimed

fsotimed is about half-way complete compared to frameworkd. The working plugin is:

• alarm: DBus alarm service as per org.freesmartphone.Time.Alarm.

fsonetworkd

fsonetwork is done with the same level of functionality as in frameworkd. The working plugin is:

• sharing: internet connection sharing.

fsogsmd

fsogsmd has been on hold since end of April due to waiting for more Vala language features. When they finally appeared in September, I picked up where I left and furiosly worked on what i perceive as the prime subsystem of FSO

The basic infrastructure is more or less complete now and we cover about 50% of the DBus API as per org.freesmartphone.GSM.*, i.e. device info, sim access, network registration, sms, and call handling is working. All work has been done in a generic way, i.e. without taking any care of modem specifics yet — which is what will be my next task before I go on covering the missing API.

fsogpsd

I have added a skeleton of that to the repository and adapted some lower-level classes in libfsotransport to work both for fsogsmd and fsogpsd. I would have done more work, but I’m not keen on implementing the Gypsy API, since I think it’s not a particular good DBus API

fsopreferencesd / fsopimd / fsoeventsd

All these have not been started, not even been thinking much about ‘em. fsopreferencesd will probably have to wait until dconf / gvariant / gsettings have finally landed in glib. fsopimd is waiting for a redesign of the opimd API. fsoeventsd needs a new architecture, but I have to discuss this with the others before we can start cranking.

2010

will be a very interesting year for Linux on mobile devices, even more so for freesmartphone.org. Due to the lack of someone funding FSO, I will probably not find much time to work on FSO in 2010 — that’s why I’m so furiously working on getting most of it to a state where others can jump in before the end of this year.

Apart from that, I hope we can get FSOSHRCON’10 happening very early in 2010 and uplevel kernel support for some of the more interesting semi-open devices such as the Palm Pre, Nokia N900, and the HTC family. FSO would be more than happy to add device-specific support for this hardware once the kernel is up to par.

Cheers!