Back to basics: Update

We are now 3 weeks (and a few days) after Openmoko announced the 'back to basics' plan. Let's look at the changes.

After one week they had all of us fooled. Most of us thought Openmoko hadn't done a thing. But a day later they gave us a rather long list of things they had done. After 2 weeks they even got a real name, the 'Optimization' team. Now the third week,

What are the main things they did?

• The boot time of a bare image (without any GSM stack) is reduced from 50 to 30 seconds. That was done by replacing the well known U-Boot by Qi. Qi is a boot loader developed by Openmoko with the focus to do just booting. It was developed, because u-boot was getting to big. It wanted to support everything and it began to look more on a kernel. Qi has focused to leave everything (except the booting) to the kernel. Even initializing the screen is considered the duty of the kernel. So a boot menu isn't included. You can do multi-boot by the times you press the power-button. It's not yet advised for replacing U-boot with Qi, because you will not be able to use dfu-util anymore.
  
• They also looked into reducing the network registering time at the Qtopia stack (The GSM stack that is used in Om 2008.9). They have been able to reduce it by 32 seconds. There are no images yet, but it will be merged in the future.
• Also the suspend/resume issues still get attention. They looked into various bugs, like #1991, #1347. The first bug is when you try to resume, it will stay a black screen. The later is when you try to resume, it immediate suspends again without any reason. For the first one, they have to do a little more debugging. For the latter, they found a fix, but they are looking into a better fix. Btw. There are patches for #1884. That's the bug, when you push the power-button just after suspending, it will do a double suspend. It will be submitted very soon.
• They also worked on their python loader for faster booting python applications. They could already reduce the load time of the pyhon sudoku from 2.59s to 1.38s.
  

Official status report