Symbian Blog

It was beginning of July when I speculated with EPLing the Symbian Kernel (EKA2), giving the process a three months window… and you may think ‘Does it takes three months to change the license notices on the files boilerplate???’.

Err, no, no, that does not take three months, but assembling a suitable kit with a true ARM instruction set simulator, a fully open source baseport for an inexpensive Beagleboard and a freely available toolchain from ARM to build it all… DOES take three months… and a bit, since we are now well into October.

Well, I guess what I am trying to say is that it is time for anyone that has not been exposed to EKA2 before to come out and play at very little or no cost and test the capabilities of the state-of-the-art real time, multitasking, SMP-ready kernel that has, is and will be shipping in millions of smartphones.

Yes, the Symbian kernel is open source and we have assembled a Kernel Taster kit to help you get started with textshell builds, more than enough to develop baseports and drivers. The kit is ready for download… what are you waiting for?.

This is a major breakthrough for the Foundation that shows our commitment to open source and the wider community while enabling the symbian ecosystem to make business as usual. We have tried to lower the adoption barrier to a bare minimum, fostering HW innovation and empowering developers to port the platform to all kind of devices, beyond that of pure personal communication devices… netbooks, perhaps?…

Fair enough, we have only tackled the first hurdle and there’s still a lot to do but now you are fully able to help make collaborative progress on all the other ‘nice-to-have’ elements that we are all eagerly waiting for; we’re almost there with GCC (watch this space on that topic) as well as making full use of ARMv7, Thumb2 and NEON… what’s on your list?.

On a personal note, being part of the team putting all of this together has been a gratifying experience, where we have had a tremendous level of coordination in our ecosystem, across several member companies, and many individuals.

There’s a great team, I mean GREAT, behind making this kit available,  ready to help as much as possible in developing it further as well as supporting you taking the first steps. To top it all, SEE09 is just around the corner and we have 2.5 hours of hands-on lab covering QEMU, Zoom2 and Beagleboard as well as a few interesting BoFs.

Some final notes… as part of the work to publish the Kernel source, we’ve also made progress on opening up the Symbian kits: from today onwards, all new Symbian PDKs and PDTs will be available to everyone under an End User License Agreement. The Kernel Taster Kit is a cut-down version of PDK 3.0.b – if you want the other 1.5 Gigabytes of stuff, the whole PDK is available from the Symbian download pages.

Ah, yes, almost forgot what most of you might be thinking… “Daniel, any updates on the plan to make the whole platform available under EPL?”.

Well, we have proven that we can deliver on promises so I am not concerned to say that we are ahead of schedule against our goal of completing the process before the middle of next year. We and the various contributors are working hard and extremely focused on making the whole platform available under EPL as soon as we can. Stay tuned!