ZDNet was able to get an interview with executives from ACCESS regarding the Access Linux Platform.
Some excerpts from the article are as follows:
More than two years have passed since PalmSource — the Palm OS developer purchased by Access in 2005 — released an update to the venerable operating system. But the next version, which is set for release next year, will be very different under the hood, according to Access executives Tomihisa Kamada and Didier Diaz.
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Still, the operating system's historic leadership in handheld computers is no longer a given. Microsoft has made huge strides in the two years that the Palm OS has languished, convincing even PalmSource's former partner-in-crime, Palm, to put Windows Mobile onto a Treo smartphone.
At the recent LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, ZDNet UK's sister site, CNET News.com, sat down with Kamada, who is Access' chief technology officer, and Diaz, who is vice president for product marketing. They discussed the Access Linux Platform and the future of the Palm community. An edited transcript follows.
Q: Where do things stand right now with the Access Linux Platform?
Diaz: What we set out to do is start from Linux and create a complete, commercial-grade mobile platform. Linux is considered to be the third platform in the mobile industry. Companies such as Orange have said that moving forward they would support all the three main multitasking operating systems — Windows, Symbian and Linux.
When you try to build a mobile platform from Linux components, you find that you have to optimise some of them. Whether it would be for footprint or performance, you actually have to replace entire components sometimes, or create components that do not exist at all. In addition, we are adding some key frameworks or subsystems that are not... in the open source area, so things such as telephony framework and messaging framework.
Kamada: Let's say only 20 percent of the system can be covered by open source. We develop all the remaining portions.
How much of the Access Linux Platform will bring Palm OS components forward?
Diaz: A big portion, actually. We are including a version of Garnet (Palm OS v5.4, the most current version) emulated. There is an abstraction layer that had been designed for Garnet to sit on various types of hardware, and we are now connecting this abstraction layer to Linux. So we are very much similar to Java; we are creating a virtual machine of Garnet inside the Access Linux Platform.
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Why Linux? Why choose to go forward with Linux as the underpinning for this operating system?
Diaz: It's been quite a journey. When we announced Palm OS for Linux last year, I would say our goals were to a large extent self-serving. What we wanted was not to have to create our own kernel any more. Why do this? The kernel doesn't differentiate you a great deal. Why spend our engineering resources on that?
Also, from an industry perspective at the time, moving to Linux especially at the kernel level allowed us to leverage all these drivers that are written by the silicon vendors as they bring up their systems.
So to begin with, I would say it was a technical reason. What we found, though, as we said "Palm OS is going to be based on Linux", was that the market came to us saying, "Hey, if you are doing this, we would like to work with you".
Kamada: Mobile phone requirements, especially for 3G, are very complicated. So we include features, such as the ability to check email [browse] and [at the same time] receive the phone call. Multitasking is an essential requirement today. There are not so many choices for multitasking operating systems today — Microsoft, Symbian and Linux. It doesn't make sense to develop a new operating system, a multitasking operating system, from scratch. So Linux is a very natural choice for us.
What would it entail to bring the Palm OS into a multitasking type of product?
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Diaz: Well, there is more than multitasking; it's the entire operating system. It goes back to our technology reasons: why would we create things that are already there? We just wrote a white paper explaining everything we had to do to really make Linux mobile. And if you look… all these components come from open source, but there are many of them that had to be written from scratch. And even those that had come from open source — in many cases, we had to do a lot of optimisation. It would be a substantially larger effort to build something from scratch than to start from Linux.
Is the idea with the Access Linux Platform to bring the same sort of philosophy forward from Palm OS, meaning the heavy reliance on third-party application developers to bring a lot of functionality to the table?
Diaz: Absolutely, I mean that's our strength. That's what we know how to do. If you look at the mobile space today, it's sprouting new applications. I started my career in the PC space and now applications tend to be the same. I mean, I don't think we are at the point where we see big revolutions, but the mobile space is still in a stage where things move very fast.
You can read the full article by Tom Krazit at
ZDNet.
