So how is the progress of the one laptop per child project? It’s coming, yup, it’s getting there.
I wrote up a long update on where we are in the software and hardware for the One Laptop per Child project. We’ve gotten a lot done, but I don’t think that’s been communicated to the outside world very well. So, for the first time, here’s an update of where we are. Hopefully I’ll be able to do this on a regular basis.
Kernel
In the One Laptop project we actually have two kernels. The first kernel, found in the BIOS, is based on LinuxBIOS. The second is a kernel that’s built from Red Hat’s sources, and aside from a few patches and a different configuration, is a pretty standard OS kernel.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been pretty successful in getting LinuxBIOS working on the test-A boards that we have in hand. This has been largely due to work from AMD and from the LB project itself. We’ve managed to get the LB image down to under 1 megabyte to fit into the onboard SPI flash that’s found on the boards. The BIOS itself is supposed to handle operating system re-installs as well as finding and booting from the internal NAND flash that contains the main OS. We haven’t got all of these pieces together yet, but we’re making a lot progress. The BIOS is able to boot from two sources right now:
1. Internal NAND flash. This requires that the BIOS is able to find the NAND flash, read the filesystem and find the boot kernel, load the boot kernel and jump to it…. Source: Christopher Blizzard