Symbian Microkernel Finally Goes Open Source 97
ruphus13 writes "Symbian announced over a year ago that they were going to Open Source their code, and the industry has been patiently waiting for that to happen. Well, it finally has. According to news on Wednesday, 'Symbian has released its platform microkernel and software development kit as open source under the Eclipse Public License. The Symbian Foundation claims that it is moving quickly toward an open source model, which is questionable, but the release of the EKA2 kernel is a signal that Symbian still means business about adopting an open source model. Accenture, ARM, Nokia and Texas Instruments contributed software to the microkernel, Symbian officials said.'"
Maemo (Score:4, Interesting)
But why would people want to develop software for Symbian now that there is Maemo? Maemo is much more of an adventure because it's new.
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I guess it's only an adventure if you happen to have a Nokia device...
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That is certainly true. Rincewind said it already in the second Discworld novel: "I like boring. It lasts."
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As the owner of an N97, let me say that Symbian V 5 is a steaming pile of shit.
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How about because the hundred of millions of Symbian (uiq/s60/DoCoMo) devices are not going to disappear? Plus there is always a market for proven robust technologies such as this. Maemo will be important to Nokia but the bulk of sales will still be Symbian powered. There is even the possibility that S40 will be relegated to the rubbish bin and supplanted by whatever the Symbian Foundation releases.
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Nokia is starting to push Symbian to cheaper devices that currently have the S40 operating system, which can't multitask, for instance. I hear that one of the good things about the Symbian OS is that it can be successfully run in considerably cheaper hardware than other smartphone operating systems.
I doubt Symbian is going to disappear any time soon, more likely its market share will increase - due to the S40->Symbian/S60 transition, much more (Nokia) phones can be categorized as "smartphones". And it's
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From all the phones I could get 'for free' with my subsciption to Vodafone, including the Sony Ericson Experia aka Experience pain, I chose the Samsung Pixon M8800 Symbian OS phone. Want to know why? Because, guess what, it's actually a PHONE instead of a mobile computer that also has a call application somewhere deep down in a hidden folder...
It's, with the exception of the HTC Hero maybe, the best phone created, yet. Opera Mini, Flash player, FM radio, local social network app, 8MP camera that makes brigh
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Putting an 8MP camera sensor in a phone (all of which have small crappy lenses) is like putting a big block V8 in a Toyota Corolla.
I still dont get why they even bother with cellphone cameras. I for one would be just as happy if my phone didnt even come with a camera and I am sure I am not alone.
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While it is true that too much megapixel on a small 'sensor' size (sorry don't know the English word) usually makes the image crappier, it actually makes very nice high quality pictures. But then again the phone was marketed as an avarge joe digital camera replacement. While I didn't buy the phone for its amount of mega pixels, I couldn't see a difference in image quality when I compared it to a 'consumer' Exilim camera without zooming.
There actually are phones out there that can only call and do text-messa
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I want an Erickson before Sony made it shit. I miss my brick phone. If I want a PC I'll carry a netbook or laptop. If I could get a netbook with cellphone and skype capability which worked with a bluetooth headset I'd get it. I've not had a lot of time to see if there's anything reliable.
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Would you rather have a:, No picture of the sensational event that you came across unexpectedly, or b:, a mobile phone pic of it?
My N95 has a Carl Zeiss lense, and a 5MP camera. Sure, it's not as good as my SLR, but the N95 is always carried with me.
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Re:Maemo (QT) (Score:2, Interesting)
If I understand correctly, developing for Maemo or Symbian doesn't exclude developing for the other platform - QT should exist on both platforms soon, allowing you to target both fairly trivially. /G
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Nokia ships multiple lines of products, perhaps also that's why it is by far the largest phone manufacturer in the world.
They currently have S30/S40, Symbian S60v3, S60v5 and Maemo. In that order from cheapest to most expensive devices. In that order from most to least popular. And I'm not even sure whether or not phones like Nokia 1100 (the most popular single model of consumer electronic device in history; more than families of other "most popular" products) fall even under S30...
Hope it helps Symbian (Score:2)
The system might be outshadowed in the media by new Android stuff, iPhones and RIM/Blackberry's media presence, but its actually very good.. install apps directly, jump between diffrent connection types, do anything you li
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Execute in place isn't so important for current Flash-based devices, but it was for older ROM-based ones and it will be again for PCRAM and similar technologies. This means that you don't need to copy code from ROM into RAM to run it, you jus
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But why would people want to develop software for Symbian now that there is Maemo?
Maemo's been out for years (N700, N800, N810, N810WIMAX) and nobody decided to develop anything of worth for it yet, why would they start now?
Market Share (Score:5, Informative)
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If everyone always developed for stuff that was out already we would still be eating raw meat off cadavers we found.
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Maybe this handy pie chart [wikipedia.org] will enlighten you. Hint: Maemo is in the grey slice.
Symbian phones belong in a "Not-that-smart-phone" category separate from the newer platforms. Sure, it was a great platform and is still useful, but it's legacy. We all know how newly-minted developers feel about legacy: junk/cruft/bloat -- throw it all away and build something new!!
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On the other hand, Maemo suffers an entirely different problem and much of that is that the us
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Microsoft open sourcing WinMo confirmed?
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Oh, SyMbian... (Score:4, Funny)
Damn, at first I thought it was the *Sybian* microkernel... now THAT would be a fun kernel to hack...
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I'm sitting on my SPEED QUEEN.. To me, it's ENJOYABLE.. I'm WARM.. I'm VIBRATORY..
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Funny, since you're probably the only person who ever heard it before. Nobody I asked here, had ever heard it.
Then again, we're no experts of fuck-machines.
Symbian (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever look at a system and think to yourself, "every time the developers had a choice in designing this thing, they chose the wrong option"? I can think of a couple [php.net]. Symbian is definitely in that class. It has:
All in all, the sooner Symbian dies, the better off I am. I might have been slightly kinder if they hadn't tried to prevent my running my own code on my own machine. No, I'm never getting another Symbian device.
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Microkernel, specifically, EKA2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKA2 [wikipedia.org]
It appears decently suited: "The Symbian kernel (EKA2) supports sufficiently-fast real-time response to build a single-core phone around itthat is, a phone in which a single processor core executes both the user applications and the signalling stack. This is a feature which is not available in Linux. This has allowed Symbian EKA2 phones to become smaller, cheaper and more power efficient than their predecessors". Certainly Symbian devices seem
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Oh well, for me its enough that I can run few OSS apps found here and there without any issues (from what I remember - only typical "are you sure you want to install this unsigned app"? at the time of installation)
As for SE - yes and no. They do have better prices in large chunk of feature phones segment (heck, my second phone is a SE G502, a fabulous deal for the price when I bought it), but their smartphones were always much more expensive (which doesn't neccessarily mean comparable Nokia ones are not, ju
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being the owner of a nokia n95 (s60 symbian) I am puzzled at how you can not run your own code.. when running unsigned code it just tells me "warning: blah is not signed" just like ssh warns me when a key is changed or some such. Then I can install it anyway.
I have not yet found any kind of drm in the phone.. at all. I install what I like from wherever I like and it just works.
The rest of your post can be summaried as "it's different from unix, so I don't like it" which is your opinion to have, but it is an
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Yes, there's a sign-signed option [symbiansigned.com]. But you're still at the mercy of Symbian; you have to submit each changed version of your application through them. And you can't run the signed binaries on any other device. Also, self-signed applications don't have full access to the device. They have only ReadUserData, WriteUserData, NetworkServices, LocalServices, and UserEnvironment capabilities.
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On all the Nokia Symbian phones I've owned, whether or not you can install unsigned applications was a phone setting. On all of them you could install unsigned apps by changing the phone setting and accepting the warning. None of them required the Symbian signed stuff.
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It depends what the application needs to do, some capabilities are only available to self-signed binaries, others are restricted to formally certified applications. I've found the self-signing process from a developers point of view to be relatively painless so I don't mind that but what has annoyed me is that each symbian version has a slightly different set of APIs and it's frustrating to find that you can't do something on a phone that's less than 2 years old with no option to upgrade the OS.
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Once again, you get what you pay for. The guy above you probably bought his phone on credit through a network operator, and blames the platform for his own failure to buy an uncrippled device.
Mind you, I think the security model changed after the N95. Now you have to self-sign your code, but whatever.
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The guy above you probably bought his phone on credit through a network operator, and blames the platform for his own failure to buy an uncrippled device.
Whom should he blame for local electronics stores' failure to sell uncrippled devices and for network operators' failure to provide service plans designed for people who bring their own phones?
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Well he certainly shouldn't blame the software platform.
Re:Symbian (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not a Gentoo user, I see.
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Mach gave microkernels a bad name. On Mach, all IPC went via Mach Ports. This included things that, on other platforms, would be system calls (on Mach they were message sends to something like a BSD kernel running as a process). Unfortunately, Mach checked the port access rights on every message send. Benchmarks showed that it took around 15 instructions for a system call or 120 instructions for a Mach message. Effectively, this made system calls an order of magnitude slower.
Newer microkernels only ch
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The rest of your reply after 0.25% doesn't really apply because this is a phone, using an ARM chip that doesn't provide nearly comparable power to a desktop.
As an previous end user of a Symbian phone, the phone was slow. It started up programs slowly, it handled task switching slowly. That's the part that matters to the end user, not stats and arguments made with the modern desktop hardware in mind.
And this is part of the reason why I stopped using my Nokia N82. The other part was that it crashed so damn of
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Is any of your complaints more than cosmetic ? Hate backslashes, do you ? forward slashes are sooooo much trendier ^^
I'll give you the weird API, though QT should abstract most of that.Active Objects doesn't sound bad, on the contrary ? Did you confuse them with ActiveX, maybe ?
Re:Symbian (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it has a goofy API. I totally agree. But I can work with it, and get stuff done...that's fine. I don't mind the microkernel...if you write your code reasonably efficiently, you can deal with that. Memory management, while necessary to make that code efficient, is clumsy and annoying. I didn't really run into the "pay for more access" nonsense, though I certainly hated that sort of stuff about Brew, too. But once you've been stuck jumping over all those hurdles, you never want to deal with it again. A smart company, designing a platform, should put third party developers above everything. Making your platform easy to develop for should always take precedence over anything else, no matter how much temptation it is to try and nickel and dime developers in order to farm cash flow out of them. The more hurdles you put up, the less chance your OS will compete in the application market, and that generates the demand that makes the carriers interested in putting your OS on their phones.
I can think of a number of OS's offhand that greatly outlived their lifetime expectations simply because they're easy to develop for and the toolchain is flexible (and free). I have Symbian development on my resume...even though it's obviously been 5 years since I did it seriously, I still get headhunters contacting me non-stop from all over the place simply because, and no offense if someone reading this does like Symbian development, it's a big time headache to deal with.
Making it open source isn't going to save it. There are too many far better mobile options out there already. webOS, Android, and Moblin are already built on open source, reasonably standardized platforms. There are more on the way. No one is going to want to fight with Symbian weirdness and 1990's style C++ when they could be doing AJAX on webOS or Java on Android.
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hahaha moblin *snort* Moblin is designed to work only on intel devices, so most of their customization has been ripping out other stuff, and cramming in intel drivers. In order to expand moblin's popularity you'd have to undo most of what intel has done. Meanwhile you'll be able to slap their same interface on top of UNR (or possibly onto the OpenGL ES-based Android, using the NDK... but be prepared to build a lot of drivers) and certainly by using Angstrom... if you can get it to build, ha ha. OpenEmbedded
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A smart company, designing a platform, should put third party developers above everything. Making your platform easy to develop for should always take precedence over anything else
Then how do companies like Nintendo get away with flatly banning people who work from home and people working on their first title from the platform [warioworld.com]?
No one is going to want to fight with Symbian weirdness and 1990's style C++ when they could be doing AJAX on webOS or Java on Android.
Unless a developer wants to reach the millions of potential customers who already use a Symbian based phone.
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So what you're complaining about is that Symbian is not Unix?
As opposed to Unix?
Re:Symbian (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, standard FAT file path conventions. The most used file system in the world. As used by about 90% of people's desktop computers.
Doing what your customers ask and pay you for is never a bad decision for development. SymbianOS customers being handset manufacturers.
Symbian exceptions predated the introduction of exceptions to C++. So it wasn;t a choice not to go with the standard, rather that Symbian was a pioneer. Symbian does have several descriptor classes, and that is confusing. But they are there for reasons of memory efficiency on what were devices with tiny memories. Properly written Symbian code will do string storage and manipulation with less memory than any other API I know.
Again, pioneering stuff. The responsiveness of multi-threaded applications without the overhead of multi-threading.
Symbian was originally written for a device with 16Mhz ARM chip. If a microkernal was OK for that, it's OK for the far more beefy specs of today's smartphones. The problem isn't with the reality of Symbian OS, it's with your entirely imagined notion of what the requirements of a microkernel are. It's a microkernel chiefly because embedded devices such as phones have to run reliably for long period of time. That's more important than marginal speed differences.
Strange = different from what you're used to.
You complaints are a mixture of not knowing the perfectly sound reasons for engineering design decisions, and your arbitrary view that Unix is the one true way.
Who are the handset manufacturers' customers? (Score:2)
SymbianOS customers being handset manufacturers.
That wouldn't be so bad (compare to Microsoft's customers being Dell, HP, Gateway, etc.) except that in the United States, the handset manufacturers' customers aren't end users; they're network operators.
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You complaints are a mixture of not knowing the perfectly sound reasons for engineering design decisions, and your arbitrary view that Unix is the one true way.
In other words, the typical Slashdotter (just replace Unix with Linux)
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How is it an arbitrary view that UNIX is the one true way?
Even if everything else you say is technically true, wouldn't
this project benefit from using the lingua franca of computing?
Or is their a hidden benefit from once again poorly recreating UNIX?
Is their a reason I should learn a new interface every time I pick up
a new device? Strange = Another waste of my time.
I find it silly that you talk about engineering design decisions and then
put down UNIX, the computer system designed by and for software enginee
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I didn't put down Unix. I use Unix. I program Unix. I'm posting with it right now. I put down the stupidity of thinking that all OSs should be like Unix.
I think you need to get a g
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Damn, I'm out of mod points, otherwise I'd have modded you troll and moved on. Suffice to say, the idiocy of this first line alone is all I'm willing to deal with, so I will attempt to enlighten you, then move on.
Do you even know WTF you're talking about? Have you ever actua
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Constantly. Since 1979. Including several years Symbian OS, and several years of Unix (OS X). Given that, the error must be in your comprehension. And your arrogance.
Just because Unix system CAN use FAT filing systems, doesn't mean that SymbianOS should do it that way, rather than using the normal FAT filing system conventions of Drive letters and slashes. Nor is there any reason to slavishly follow a MINORITY OS such as Unix. You're another o
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If I recall correctly C++ had some implementations of exception already when Symbian was spawned from the depths of heck. Standard didn't have them yet. So if Symbian would have waited a bit it would have standard exception mechanism. When I was writing stuff for Symbian (2002 - 2004) I recall that the awkward exception paradigm was what I hated the most.
Other thing was that awful two-state object construction or whatever it was called. I rem
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The first release of GCC with C++ exceptions was in 1997. The first device with SymbianOS (EPOC32) on was released in 1997. Of course SymbianOS had been in development for a few years before then, and the exception decision was an early one.
You can't "wait a bit" (a year or two) to release a commercial product. Especially when you don;t know how the fu
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In other words, standard FAT file path conventions. The most used file system in the world. As used by about 90% of people's desktop computers.
Um, "FAT file path conventions" means 8.3 filenames and no slashes at all, and restricted to a very small set of ASCII characters. Not even Windows has used this in a long time. I think you are maybe talking about "MSDOS conventions".
Windows accepts both forward and backward slashes in filenames and treats them equivalently. Backslash is used as an escape character i
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# Drive letters. Enough said.
They're quite useful and can be abstracted away by an interface, such as through a "libraries" model (like windows) or through some other means.
# Backslashes as directory separators
Well, you've got me on this one.
# Pervasive DRM, with code signing and a pay-us-to-access-more-OS-features capability model
Here's the kernel! Get crack-a-lackin'.
# Non-POSIX filesystem semantics
Not automatically a bad thing. Does raise the bar for ports though.
# A microkernel architecture for devices least able to afford the overhead
Fail, fail. Amiga had a sub-8-MHz processor and a microkernel architecture and it beat the pants off every PC you could get your hands on for genuinely DOING STUFF and BEING RESPONSIVE. If Symbian blows, it's not because it's micr
Is this in time to actually matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
WebOS, Android and iPhone OS look to be fixin' to eat Symbian's lunch... will open-sourcing things make a difference?
Reality check (Score:5, Interesting)
- Symbian chips on slighly more than half of smartphones (which is another way of saying "it ships more devices than all other players combined")
- vast majority of phones sold all over the world aren't smartphones, but feature phones (for example with Nokia S30 or S40)
- Nokia seems to be pushing Symbian into the place of S40 (I guess Maemo wil be at the top)
Symbian isn't going anywhere. It will grow bigtime. Out of OSes you list only Android, IMHO, has similar potential (it also seems to be coming to cheap devices). They won't even really have to compete with each other, with such huge market for the taking.
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WebOS and Android are in that 2%. Symbian only really matters in the smartphone market in the same way that Windows matters in the desktop market.
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You mean, because Symbian is oh such a small player, with over 50% market share? ^^
And because Nokia is not already doing a smooth fading from Symbian to Linux, taking the best of both, and making a mobile OS out of it, that beats everything else?
That's the reason they open-source Symbian stuff: So they can e.g. create compatibility layers between Symbian and Linux, while still never getting into trouble with the licenses.
The first step in the right direction. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Nokia is porting over Qt to run on top of symbian. Once that's done it will be simple enough to use a 'sane' API.
Symbian's Kernel has it where it counts (Score:5, Interesting)
I am biased because I worked for Symbian and now Nokia. What I say is entirely my personal opinion.
There's a lot to be dissatisfied with in Symbian but the kernel is good. It works on a lot of different hardware and is very economical with power. It's also extremely reliable. For all that it is a microkernel-based OS, it needs very little in the way of hardware It isn't like Linux or Darwin because they were originally made under the assumption of all sorts of nice things like having a power socket all the time. They catch up but they aren't there yet.
It's also written in pretty simple C++ without the warts that the user-side APIs. Since the user-side stuff is being supplanted by QT and the STL I think that there is hope there. It's also getting some fairly serious SMP support which is well suited to the mobile world (having more less powerful CPUs is good for power consumption if you can switch them on and off).
I work on another thing that's about to be open sourced and I must be a good boy and wait for the SEE next week (what used to be the Smartphone show) before talking about it. But a lot is being done and by people who are just as unhappy or more so about the status quo.
It will be interesting to see how other OSes fare when they try to tackle the problems associated with scale and numbers of different models.
BTW, I use Linux on my desktop and I am a big fan of it.
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Stallman, is that you again? Quit trying to rename
my operating system for your own glory.
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How, the Nokia Eclipse/GCC/Perl based toolchain doesn't work on Linux?
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Can't tell you till next week. :-)
Thank you, Android (Score:5, Insightful)
This issue is clearly being pushed forward by open-source Android. Smarter - and, maybe, weaker- competitors realize they must match Android's flexibility and openness.
Windows Mobile will either have to offer an extremely compelling experience, Apple-like, or will be FOSSed into oblivion ? I'm taking bets, but only one way ^^
Dream scenario: Smartphones -> Tablets/ebooks -> Netbooks -> PCs.
Well, in the long run S60 it probably not the one to do that. But Maemo or Android, in a "bigger" version ?
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You will always find some people who are happy to give their creations and time away with no cost to someone who will simply package that thing and re-sell it at a profit.
These people are useful idiots
Let me clarify exactly what you are driving at here but if you are trying to say that people that contribute to any open source projects are "useful idiots" just because somebody might sell it, then you are just spouting pure nonsense and flamebait.
People donate time and energy to FLOSS for many reasons. I am personally on the list of contributors for several projects. These applications are very useful to me and either have no feature analogous proprietary counterparts or none that run on my preferred p
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Windows Mobile will either have to offer an extremely compelling experience, Apple-like, or will be FOSSed into oblivion ? I'm taking bets, but only one way ^^
Since you use the phrase "FOSSed into oblivion", I guessed which way. Do you also take bets on year of the Linux desktop? I smell easy money...
"dumbphones" (Score:1, Offtopic)
I hope this gets ported to other dumbphones because some of the OSes out there (looks at sony ericson) really suck, I suppose jailbreaking a dumbphone will be tricky (especially when i could just buy a nokia), but if it means I don't lose all my text messages once a month it'll be worth it (for me)!
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