Request: Dual Boot

[icurafu]

I'm not sure who is working on the actual official firmware OS, but I have heard hints that it will be some kind of Debian compatible thing that will allow surfing, office apps, instant messaging, themes and synchronisation to name a few.

I'm a little concerned that this may invalidate the Pandora as a gaming console and instead place it as a ultra lightweight UMPC. Traditionally, we would expect a lightweight menu such as on the GP2X, with simple navigation to the games/apps that need to be run. In this case, multitasking needs to be explicit, that is as with the GP2X, allowing music to play even after exiting the application.

However, the Pandora is a whole lot more powerful than the GP2X with a heap of interfaces that allow flexible interaction. With all this power, we can expect fast web navigation while multitasking a chat client for example. However, when we do this, we consume memory and eventually when we load a game we're left with significantly less memory. Let's say the user is diligent and kills off all apps before loading a game; the game will still be limited by memory already allocated to the OS for themes and caching for example. In this case, the game developer does not know how much memory is available which is not how a console developer should think. He/she will need to think like a PC (or PPC) developer and assume the majority of people will have a certain amount free.

My request is that whoever is developing the OS, OpenPandora, or whatever it is called, make a start-up that is dual-boot, so that it loads the light-wight menu by default (something as cool as gmenu2x) and load into the heavy-weight OS when "start" is held down at start-up. (Something cool like Ubuntu mobile).

So the user can decide what type of mood they are in. Straight out gaming or multimedia, with a super quick start-up to get straight into gaming or a movie; or Surfing the net on their couch, dropping between a few apps, maybe including solitaire or games that wont consume great amounts of RAM; or watching a TV show from a TV-out chip. So, catering for direct or versitile moods.

Thanks for listening to my waffeling, which I do from time to time. I'd just like to start discussion on something people tend to ignore. If this feature was available, I would be interested to know what mode people would use more oftenly. I'm defiently going to say direct mode. I've got other tools for portable webing. I can see myself falling back to the Pandora versitile mode whenever my gf steals my UMPC.

 

[Vorporeal]

The iPodLinux project had a very similar bootloader for a while - if you did nothing it would boot into the Apple firmware, but if you held down the rewind button it would boot into Linux.

A better solution would be to have it bring up a simple graphical loader (GRUB/LILO style, I assume) if Select was held, to allow for more than just dual booting (if some crazy person wanted more than 2 OSes possible startup environments/applications on their Pandora).

 

[Prophet]

I agree with the basic sentiment of this post.

A really quick barebones loader to run game/emulation apps with maximum resources available to them would be great.

 

[Pleng]

My request is that whoever is developing the OS, OpenPandora, or whatever it is called, make a start-up that is dual-boot, so that it loads the light-wight menu by default (something as cool as gmenu2x) and load into the heavy-weight OS when "start" is held down at start-up. (Something cool like Ubuntu mobile).

Well as the basic firmware would be running on a Linux kernal anyway you should be abe to have a menu load up super fast, and the menu could have the option for "desktop" which would continue loading the GNU and X environment. More intuative, I feel, thanhaving to hold down a button when powering on.

 

[Prometheus]

What Prophet said.

(Just posting to add another voice to the support of this idea, basically, hence the shortness. )

 

[icurafu]

Vorporeal, Graet idea. Is this kind of like a lilo? Which times-out to default after a few seconds? I'm mostly interested in what would be there by default to ensure that software can be made for a default firmware.

Pleng, that sounds like a great idea and certainly my preference, however for someone that would use Desktop, or versitile mode, there would be a stop-gap. Say it takes 8 seconds to load the minimal/direct OS, the user would then load Desktop, which would maybe take 2 seconds to unload the minimal OS and an extra 12 seconds to load the Desktop. If I was a desktop user, I would prefer it to just load straight into desktop.

I'm the sort of person with a 2 second attention span, so maybe it would be acceptable for normal people.

 

[Yos-T]

Linux has runlevels for this. There is no need for a dual boot. You're going to want to boot to linux everytime. The applications that are started can be controlled by editing /etc/inittab.
You can edit the sysinit script to decide which runlevel you want to use.

Also I think that the size/complexity of the window manager won't have too much of an impact on the performance of games. Most of it will exists in cache anyway, so when a game needs memory the kernel will free some of the cache. There will not be any swapping, because Pandora won't have swap space.

 

[juanvvc]

Yos-T holds the answer. Most things in Linux run in user space, so no reboot needed for different desktop or minimal environments. I imagine that you switch on the Pandora and get a minimal, fast SDL interface in seconds. There, appart from links to emulators, games and so, you have a 'huge system' link, that is a small script that changes the runlevel and runs the X server, apache tomcat and a thermonuclear power plant. Change the runlevel again and go back to the minimal menu without any rebooting.

 

[sindbad]

Even without all that runlevel switching, I doubt that Kdrive eats up all that much. If anything, a loader like gdm/kdm from where you can choose either a game or the desktop thing (when the xserver gets started).

 

[icurafu]

Great. What's important is not that it can be done. (That's obvious.) It's that it will be built into the firmware.

Anyway, just an idea for the OS team. I'm basically stating the obvious to ensure it gets included.

 

[Kings]

As far as I know there was discussion that the Pandora will at default boot into a user GUI (GP2X like). If a button combo is held down than it will load X windows.

 

[Pleng]

Pleng, that sounds like a great idea and certainly my preference, however for someone that would use Desktop, or versitile mode, there would be a stop-gap. Say it takes 8 seconds to load the minimal/direct OS, the user would then load Desktop, which would maybe take 2 seconds to unload the minimal OS and an extra 12 seconds to load the Desktop. If I was a desktop user, I would prefer it to just load straight into desktop.

Well I don't think it would really work like that.

You see anything that is loaded up before the 'mini' menu would still be needed for the full desktop environment.

So say it took thirty seconds to load up full desktop, and 10 to boot into mini menu. It shoud theoreticall only take 20 seconds to launch full desktop from mini-menu.

Anyway you could combine the two. If you hold down 'start' or 'a' while powering on it could boot straight into the full desktopm, but if you boot into minimenu first it could still offer you an icon to switch to full desktop mode.

 

[teggun]

I hope it doesn't take 30 seconds for the pandora to boot

 

[sindbad]

I hope it doesn't take 30 seconds for the pandora to boot

The eeepc boots quite fast and it has a much larger root image. I'd expect it to be very fast, especially when coming out of hibernation (only possible with a card in).

 

[Squidge]

I hope it doesn't take 30 seconds for the pandora to boot

No, it'll probably take longer

(Just kidding )

 

[Vorporeal]

Linux has runlevels for this. There is no need for a dual boot. You're going to want to boot to linux everytime. The applications that are started can be controlled by editing /etc/inittab.
You can edit the sysinit script to decide which runlevel you want to use.

Also I think that the size/complexity of the window manager won't have too much of an impact on the performance of games. Most of it will exists in cache anyway, so when a game needs memory the kernel will free some of the cache. There will not be any swapping, because Pandora won't have swap space.

Runlevels wouldn't work as well, I doubt. Runlevels are more for whether you want to boot into a single-user recovery console, a no-network boot, a terminal, or a graphical interface. This is to allow the user to choose what kind of application/graphical interface is run after the kernel finishes loading and init goes to completion. What the iPodLinux project used was that they allowed for the user to pass an argument to the kernel from the bootloader, and that argument was a command to be run after the kernel finished loading. This would do exactly what Prophet stated - run an emulator or other program with the most resources possible (as all that would have been run on the device is the kernel loading and a minuscule script to process the kernel argument).

 

[sindbad]

But you can use runlevels for this. When runlevels change, some scripts get executed. Those scripts could do basically anything.

 

[Squidge]

There will be multiple boot options on startup - you can hold down a button to launch an application directly from the bootloader (ie. you don't want the Linux Kernel loaded), or you can load a kernel from sd card (you want to boot/test your own kernel without writing it to the nand), or you can select boot options for when the kernel is loaded: console, fb gui or x gui. Most of these options are for developers and/or people wanting to fix there Pandora easily after they have managed to break them by random deletion and/or modification of files on the nand. All are subject to change or non-implementation.

 

[icurafu]

Thanks Squidge. I guess at this point, the answer is no. unless you make it yourself.

EDIT: Oh, yeah. Thanks for all the exciting information. I'm glad sd card booting is an option.

 

[javaJake]

I would also be in favor of this. A device geared for gaming as its first priority should have a boot option that represents that priority.

Unless the "FB gui" is the minimalistic GUI, in which case, hooray!