The £5,000 Challenge

[myownlittlworld]

Recently, I came across SwiftBoot and their >1 second startup times. I recalled some folks being annoyed at the length of time it takes the Pandora to start from a cold boot. So, I figured I'd offer the rich and non-technical users an option - we can take up a collection to put enough cash together to fund one of their fixed-price investigations for the Pandora, probably reducing the cold-boot time by more than 50%.


In the end though, it probably doesn't much matter, given how the Pandora can resume from suspend pretty much instantly (as shown in one of ED's awesome videos, don't remember which), and that you only need to cold-boot the Pandora after kernel upgrades (when you want to use the new kernel, which isn't necessarily immediately).


Our other option is to get one of the company's developers interested in buying a Pandora, so that they'll do that sort of work for a hobby. :rolleyes:


There's supposed to be a £ character in the title, but I forget subtleties like that.

 

[craigix]

5 grand.


...


5 grand.


... ... .....


words have failed me.

 

[XxionxX]

I got $20, and maybe more if we wanna keep this open for a while. I would be willing to pay for some kick ass boot time software.


Edit: I need to know that I can get my monies back if I cant get something for them.

 

[Dude]

Rather, I would invest in applications, games, and contests!


There are likely several pandora users (now and in the immediate future)


who are going to try many optimizations, as well as cold boot time...


This is all way too much fun...!!! Possibilities are endless...

 

[WizardStan]

There's no doubt in my mind it can be brought down to 30 seconds, but below that would seriously be pushing it. As was noted on the other forum, the techniques being used in SwiftBoot involve cutting out a out a lot of things that actually make the Pandora useful as a fully interactive toy.


My own personal experience has my Pandora's uptime measured in weeks; booting happens so rarely an extra 30 seconds doesn't really affect me. Seems to me that the money and effort that you want to be put toward getting cold boot times down would be better spent getting a more efficient hibernate feature in place. Just my opinion though.

 

[Norfen]

Agree. With the standby time being incredible and rarely having to reboot, 5 grand isn't worth it. Our customer base is technical enough to deal with a long boot once in a while. Invest in dev donations or something more worthwhile.

 

[htl2001]

As Norfen said, a donation to the dev fund would probably be more useful. 5 grand would probably get you 90% of the reduction these guys can do (I'm granting that they probably know a bit of special stuff since they do this so much) but also get a bunch of other stuff besides just optimized boot times

 

[XxionxX]

I didn't know we had a dev fund. How is it distributed? Where is it? What is being developed?

 

[GunPei2X]

To be honest, I haven't even noticed the boot time on my Pandora. That tells me something.

 

[Eridger]

Come on. We're talking about optimizing the boot time of a device geared towards retro gamers and -this is the important part here- homebrew developers. The O/S on this device is totally free to modify, and ED even has his own github for his hotfixes.


You don't think that someone somewhere down the line won't take a crack at improving the boot time on this thing?


I don't think that's anywhere near as important as fixing other software problems or quirks. The low-power mode, for example, could use a lot of polish to conserve on battery life (from what I've read). Once that gets perfected I don't see a reason why the Pandora would ever be turned off.


Hell, the thing probably lasts forever in low-power as it is...

 

[richiz]

My boot time is far quicker than my HTC hero.


Once booted you just drop it in standby. Much like the psp standby.


Is rather see the dev fund for homebrew competitions or optimizing psx.

 

[Scntrblob]

5000? 5000? Do a coding competition with that and we would have a >>BOOM<< of software that would be much more worth than some stupid seconds of boottime. The last one for the WiZ had much less and the results were things like Ginge, PCSX4All, better SNES and a great bunch of hombebrew.

 

[tsh]

I'm wondering if that much cash would get the kernel updated to 2.6.37 together with the performance and power management improvements that come with that. Boot time is at the bottom of my list of wants - it is good enough to not be an issue, even when I was messing about building the kernel and re-booting as part of that.

 

[siggjen]

Is it possible to set up a system so users can donate for a specific development? For instance porting a specific game, fixing a part of the system, customice a chosen application so it work better on Pandora etc? I know the Aros project has done this successfully.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Cutting boot time by 50% is damn easy on a Linux system.


90% should be a real challenge.


But you forgot one thing : Pandora is a "multimedia" thing, so you just can't remove stuff here and there without taking care of end users.

 

[ZXDunny]

They need to sort out the actual suspend feature before we worry about boot times. My battery keeps going flat because it turns itself back on, seemingly at random (but only when it's in my bag or my pocket). The number of times I've taken it out of my bag after four or five hours only to find I'm at 10% battery is getting boring now.


D.

 

[drohan]

5000? 5000? Do a coding competition with that and we would have a >>BOOM<< of software that would be much more worth than some stupid seconds of boottime. The last one for the WiZ had much less and the results were things like Ginge, PCSX4All, better SNES and a great bunch of hombebrew.

Totally agree... best thing for pandora project at this state will be this kind of initative. I will push in that direction with donations if occurrs.

 

[richiz]

Getting Nexuiz on the Pandora would be a massive win. It's a heavily modified quake game.


http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/

 

[j0n]

Getting Nexuiz on the Pandora would be a massive win. It's a heavily modified quake game.


http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/

Yep I thought of that a while ago, pretty great game, very well polished.


Here are the deps on arch, are all of these on the pandora?


* alsa-lib


* curl


* libjpeg >=8


* libmodplug


* libpng >=1.4.0


* libvorbis


* libxpm


* libxxf86dga


* libxxf86vm


* nexuiz-data


* sdl

 

[ahahah]

is there an hibernate/sleep mode on pandora? if yes, which quantity of battery consumption does it use?


how long it can stay in this mode before the battery needs to be charged again?