the second operating system

joerg Reisenweber joerg at openmoko.org
Tue Dec 10 21:54:31 CET 2013


On Tue 10 December 2013 21:12:02 Bernard Schelberg wrote:
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: joerg Reisenweber <joerg at openmoko.org>
> > To: community at lists.openmoko.org
> > Cc:
> > Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2013 01:00:13 +0100
> > Subject: Re: the second operating system
> > 
> > On Mon 09 December 2013 19:32:28 Norayr Chilingarian wrote:
> > > There is an osnews article named "The second operating system hiding in
> > > every mobile phone", and I guess some people in this list may be
> > > interested. Not that we didn't know about it, just wanted to share an
> > > article with you.
> > > 
> > > http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_system_hiding_in
> > > _eve ry_mobile_phone
> > 
> > This article is of pretty poor quality and quite misleading. :-S
> > Deprecated!
> 
> Do you have a better article on this subject that you can recommend?
> Or could you explain some more about how it is misleading? The reason
> I ask is that I'm having an ongoing conversation with colleagues about
> why I continue to support projects that are working to bring us a free
> phone. I thought the article referenced made some convincing points,
> but I don't want to quote it if it's incorrect.

The article completely lacks any discussion of how entangled or not entangled 
the modem is with the "first OS". On dumbphones there's even no "first OS" at 
all and the whole phone UI is handled by the modem OS. 
While on free phones like GTA0x and Neo900[1] the modem is as much a part of 
"the first OS" as e.g. a USB stick you plug to your PC is running a "second OS" 
on your PC.
We actually have ~12 .. 15 "other OSes" running on any modern PC or 
smartphone, basically every smart chip comes with its own CPU that of course 
needs an "OS". The modem is just another extremely large and smart "chip" of 
that category, but it's not at all entangled with the primary OS - ON FREE 
PHONES. For the usually android crap things look different, since often main 
CPU and modem share same chip and same RAM and you never can tell what the 
modem OS could do to the main OS.

Hope that explained a bit of what I miss in that article. It's not incorrect 
but simply not comprehensive and thus misleading. A modem OS is exactly NOT 
similar to a PC BIOS "second OS" (see my other post). The article creates such 
misconceptions.

cheers
jOERG

[1] http://neo900.org/faq#privacy
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