Aurora

[Michael 'Mickey' Lauer]

Am Freitag, den 20.05.2011, 19:57 +0200 schrieb Enrico Zini:
> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 06:02:58PM +0200, Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> 
> > SUPPORTED DEVICES
> > 
> > We decided to only support the Palm Pre devices (Pre/Pre Plus/Pre 2) for
> > the first to-be-released version of Aurora. More
> > supported devices will join after the 0.1 release. This decision has
> > been forced by the fact that we are only very few people
> > working both on FSO and Aurora (and also on OpenEmbedded). Later on, we
> > expect to see the OpenEZX family of devices,
> > the Openmoko devices, the Nokia N900, and possibly also a bunch of HTC
> > smartphones supported.
> 
> Thank you for the announcement, it sounds nice. This bit made me wonder,
> though: why must each different platform require a separate effort? Is
> there something in FSO which works differently on different kinds of
> phones?

Yes, unfortunately... but that's due to the nature of being
a middleware. Middleware is an abstraction layer on top of the
hardware which shields the applications from the underlying
differences. That means while FSO provides always the same
interface to the applications, the hard and daunting task
is to cope with the device specifics and make them "disappear".

FSO has to deal with varying kernel-level interfaces, such
as to audio routing, GSM modem, accelerometers, LEDs, buttons,
peripheral control... to name just a few.

Although we have seen a welcome level of standardization
via kernel class devices in the past years, there are still
too many home-grown vendor solutions and interfaces developed
out of the kernel tree. All those we (FSO) have to adapt
to provide a unified experience to the application level.

Cheers,

-- 
:M: