Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

All the folks who presented at the January 2008 Silicon Valley MoMo have agreed to share their presentations. We had a great event overall, the discussions that sprung up and the questions that the audience asked were spectacular. One of the things that interested me the most as a fan of open Linux systems in mobile was that the ecosystem is pushing toward single core systems for mobile Linux.

Currently just about the only way to get a consumer device onto a cellular network (unless you’re Motorola or have similarly deep pockets) is to use a premade GSM module to interface with the network and then include your standard embedded CPU for running Linux. That’s where this “two core” comes from, there’s normally a DSP of some kind in the GSM module and the general purpose CPU you have running Linux. So why not just have your general CPU handle most of the stuff the DSP does instead of building in a custom module? It’s not like software radio is unproven ground.

The reason is this archaic system run by a cult called the FCC (here in the US at least, other areas have their own issues). If you don’t have the cellular functions walled off in their own little area in a device that the FCC can approve then you’ll never be allowed to give your device to consumers. People who do integrate the baseband functions into the generic CPU need to take their whole packaged system and with every rev send it through FCC approvals. Not something that’s very small company or startup friendly. Fortunately, innovation isn’t too high on the list of things the FCC needs to provide for, so they’re cool with that.

Apparently some of the silicon vendors and people working on embedded Linux are pretty sure that with the right setup for hard realtime Linux we can get approvals for the base system on a single core and not need to resubmit for every release. There’s a technique floating around out there that runs a hard realtime kernel under Linux and effectively runs all of Linux in a thread (see, virtualization really does apply to everything from servers to embedded systems) that would be able to firewall the entire Linux kernel off from the functioning of the baseband processor. That’s great news that there’s interest in moving the solutions in that direction! I think it would really open up a lot of doors for small and medium sized businesses to start releasing cellular devices.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 11:35 am and is filed under Community, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.